The School of Law Undergraduate Program is offering eight sections of LAW 402: Special Topics in Spring 2024. Each section covers a different subject and students are permitted to enroll in multiple sections of LAW 402, covering different topics. LAW 402 can satisfy Law BA - Advanced Law Seminar requirement(s).
Immigration Law and Policy - Registration #23587 - Professor Kerry Battenfeld
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: Immigration is a complex and dynamic area of law. This course will introduce you to the basic concepts and procedures underlying immigration law in the United States. We will discuss the legal, historical, and political considerations that have shaped U.S. immigration law. Topics to be addressed include: the history of immigration law and the constitutional basis for regulating immigration; the roles of Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary in immigration law; state involvement in immigration law and policy; who is permitted to enter the United States, who is permitted to remain, how a person can be removed from the United States, and relief from removal.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: The United States incarcerates a larger portion of its population than any other nation. Between the mid-1970s and early 2000s, the nation's level of incarceration quadrupled, far outpacing most other countries. Despite declining recently, the U.S. still imprisons nearly 2 million people in local, state, or federal prisons and jails and has an additional 3.6 million people under other forms of correctional supervision, like probation and parole. There is now bipartisan acknowledgement that mass incarceration places an enormous strain on public resources, provides modest crime-control effects at best, and causes numerous negative consequences for people and communities most directly impacted by it. Yet, to date, reform efforts have achieved only limited success.
This seminar explores how mass incarceration developed since the 1970s and how it affected the country's legal, political, and social order. We will consider changes in broad areas of criminal justice administration, such as policing practices and sentencing law. We will also examine internal changes to penal institutions, the legal status of incarcerated persons, and prison litigation over various conditions of confinement, prison management, disciplinary systems, medical and mental health care, solitary confinement, and current correctional programming. Throughout, we will consider how social, economic, and political factors shaped the growth of the carceral state and current prospects of reform.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: The course aims to familiarize you with the diverse spectrum of legal issues encompassed by military justice. The fundamental objective of any criminal law system is to discover the truth, acquit the innocent without unnecessary delay or expense, punish the guilty proportionately for their crimes, and prevent and deter future crimes. Military justice shares these objectives, and also serves to enhance good order and discipline within the armed forces. A recurring point of debate, especially during high-profile cases that capture public attention, revolves around the rationale for a distinct military justice system. In this course, we seek to answer that question by delving into a wide array of topics, including the transformation of commander roles, the constitutional rights afforded to military personnel, intricacies of court-martial proceedings, and the spectrum of diverse disciplinary measures.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description:This course will provide an overview of the many areas of health law that counsel for a health system or healthcare provider would encounter. This will include topics such as physician contracting, practice acquisition, Medicare, Medicaid, health system compliance, risk management, corporate practice of medicine and professional licensing. Students will also get the opportunity to draft basic documents, negotiate independently with their peers and take a deeper dive into an area of health law that is of interest to them.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: In this course we will explore the racial policies and practices that have centered inequality in the production of the urban, built, and natural environments, and we will examine the how this production has impacted African Americans. Together, we will probe the period from contact to the present day. In each of the course's seven units, organized thematically and chronologically, we will read court cases, first-hand accounts, and historical overviews that will help to frame critical questions about mobility and settlement, work and housing, and city life and civil rights that deepen our understanding of the relationship between race, law, and the city. We will ask, what impact do social values have on planning? What are the effects of inequality on urban design? We will also explore law's impact on the urban environment to ask: does law shape society? Does society shape law? What is the difference between legal principles and everyday practices? Together, these units, questions, and materials will bring us inside crucial moments that have racialized the spaces of American cities.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: This course examines the specific legal issues inherent in capital punishment within the general area of criminal law and procedure. Included will be detailed coverage of both substantive and procedural law of capital punishment, as well as the roles of lawyers, judges, and juries within this legal system. Law and legal analysis in death penalty statutes and cases are the major focuses of this course, with attention also given to empirical analyses of the practice and philosophical examinations as to its wisdom. We will consider the impact of racism, poverty, and ineffective legal representation on capital punishment.
Primarily, however, the course is about the law; the rules and procedures which govern who is, and is not, subject to the death penalty; what principles does the law invoke to distinguish death-worthy cases from cases where the sanction of death itself would be unlawful. We will also consider moral and philosophical questions about the death penalty to the extent that such questions affect or influence legal thought and policy, and explore some emerging issues implicated by most recent death penalty jurisprudence.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; LAW 201 or LAW 202; and LAW 305
- Course Description: The objective for this class is to teach students the basics of handling a criminal case from inception through trial, using New York State as a model. Students will learn the fundamentals of all stages of a criminal proceeding including, but not limited to investigation, obtaining and handling evidence, case preparation, arraignment, motions, hearings and all parts of a criminal trial. Students will learn from both the prosecution and the defense perspectives. The instruction will include an overview of practice, procedure, and ethics and will include weekly written and oral assignments. The class will help students both develop an understanding of the criminal legal and litigation process, as well as to develop confidence to practice the art of oral presentation using their own skills and strengths.
- Pre-Requisites: LAW 101; and LAW 201 or LAW 202
- Course Description: TBA