267.4 sec. 001 - Law & History Foundation Seminar (Fall 2024)
Instructor: Christopher Lawrence Tomlins (view instructor's teaching evaluations - degree students only | profile)
View all teaching evaluations for this course - degree students only
Units: 3
Grading Designation: Graded
Mode of Instruction: In-Person
Meeting:
M 2:10 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: 2240 Piedmont 102
From August 19, 2024
To December 02, 2024
Course End: December 02, 2024
Class Number: 32138
Enrollment info:
Enrolled: 17
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 20
As of: 11/28 05:03 PM
Law 267.4 is The Law & History Foundation Seminar for the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Graduate Program at Berkeley Law. It is a reading and discussion seminar open to all JSP graduate students, Berkeley Law JD, LLM, and JSD students, and graduate students from other campus programs and other Bay Area institutions. This is a shared course with History and the Program in Critical Theory. Students from those departments should register in their department's course accordingly.
As in previous years, Law 267.4 will explore the central themes of American legal development, while also investigating the way legal history has matured as a field of study or “discipline.” But we are living in interesting times, in which the varied exploitations of colonialism, racism, and capitalism have become the subject of intense public examination and argument. So the course will give explicit attention to the question of how history - as theory, as philosophy, as method, or simply as narrative - can help us understand the role that law has played, and plays, in the construction of our times. The course will concentrate on the legal history of the United States, but it will begin with a pointed glance at Early America, which will help to pose the question of how we should think about law as a phenomenon. In other words, what is “law”?
Considered as a field of study, legal history is as much history as law, and history is primarily a discipline of the book. For this reason I have chosen to make Law 267.4 a course that focuses on books. We will read a wide selection of the field’s best work, ranging from classics that have structured the field, stirred controversy, and inspired generations of scholars (like James Willard Hurst’s *Law and the Conditions of Freedom* and Morton Horwitz’s *Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860*), to the best work of the current generation of field leaders (like Laura Edwards’ *The People and their Peace* and Michael Willrich's *City of Courts*), to notable recent work (like William Novak's *New Democracy* and Ken Kersch's *Conservatives and the Constitution*). We will accumulate considerable knowledge of the substance of American legal history, but we will also give close critical attention to the very different ways in which scholars have chosen to write the history of American law, and the very different subjects about which they have considered it appropriate to write).
In the American law school curriculum, a legal history course is usually considered an "enrichment” or “perspective” elective because it does not offer instruction in doctrine or skills directly oriented to law practice. One might consider the absence of a clear instrumental function liberating. Law school is likely to be the last extended period in a budding lawyer’s life when they can explore general ideas about law, probe theories, think about large issues of justice or policy, and develop skills in research and analysis. In a legal history course, student and teacher are freed to enjoy the intellectual experience of reading and discussing intelligently-written material unconstrained by the necessity that it be directly “relevant” to, say, bar admission.
Still, lack of direct relevance may not seem very sensible to students with crowded schedules. Why read all this stuff if it has no direct instrumental take-away?
This is a sensible question, to which there are two answers. The first is the enrichment/perspective answer: to study the history of law is to study the culture and practice of one’s chosen profession. Historical knowledge supplies both “deep background” on what one is doing in the present, and also a fund of examples and parallels that help one understand why one is doing it. The second answer is that how one studies in a course like this can be of real practical benefit. Lawyers (particularly young lawyers) are required to assimilate large amounts of information efficiently, grasp the essentials, and analyze them. This course requires that you develop an ability to assimilate and analyze large quantities of information.
Our emphasis will be on weekly discussions of common readings. Concretely, each week we will all read a book, in whole or in part. We will all come to class prepared and willing to talk about what we have read. To prime discussion, each class participant will circulate (via bCourses) brief and informal impressions/questions about the week’s reading to every other participant and to the instructor.
For more detailed information on readings and assessment, see the course syllabus (on bCourses or obtainable from the instructor). *As the syllabus indicates, reading preparation for the first class meeting is required.*
Students enroll in this course for 3 units. JSP students are required to take an additional 1 unit in conjunction with this course through enrolling in Law 602. The additional unit of credit requires additional work within the course framework. To enroll in Law 602, JSP students must complete an Add Form by the add deadline and submit the completed form to the Registrar's Office.
Attendance at the first class is mandatory for all currently enrolled and waitlisted students; any currently enrolled or waitlisted students who are not present on the first day of class (without prior permission of the instructor) will be dropped. The instructor will continue to take attendance throughout the add/drop period and anyone who moves off the waitlist into the class must continue to attend or have prior permission of the instructor in order not to be dropped.
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Requirements Satisfaction:
This class may either fulfill Option 2 of the J.D. writing requirement with instructor approval or units from this class may count toward the J.D. Race and Law Requirement but not both. |
New - Submit Teaching Evaluations (enrolled students only)
Exam Notes: (P) Final paper
(Subject to change by faculty member only through the first two weeks of instruction)
Course Category: Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP)
This course is listed in the following sub-categories:
Race and Law
Social Justice and Public Interest
If you are the instructor or their FSU, you may add a file like a syllabus or a first assignment to this page.
Readers:
No reader.
Books:
Required Books are in blue
- Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire
Sam Erman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108401494
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: To Be Determined - Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
Dylan C. Penningroth
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 9781324093114
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: To Be Determined - Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America
Martha S. Jones
Edition: 2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316604724
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 27.99
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
Michael Willrich
Edition: 2003
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521794039
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 26.24
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism
Ken I. Kersch
Edition: 2019
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521139809
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 34.99
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
Nicole Eustace
Edition: 2021
Publisher: Liverlight
ISBN: 9781631495878
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 20.00
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era
Nate Holdren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108448666
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: To Be Determined - Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States
James Willard Hurst
Edition: 1956
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299013639
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 18.95
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State
William J. Novak
Edition: 2022
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674260443
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 45.00
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Saidiya V. Hartman
Edition: 1997
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195089844
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 31.78
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - The People and their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South
Laura F. Edwards
Edition: 2009
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807859322
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 28.52
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
Morton J. Horwitz
Edition: 1977
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674903715
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: 38.50
Note: prices are sampled from internet bookstores. Law-school Bookstore prices are unavailable at this time. - The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970
Kunal M. Parker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009335232
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: To Be Determined - Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
Claudio Saunt
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 9780393541564
e-Book Available: unknown
Price: To Be Determined