Courses

Margo Schlanger - Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse

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Fall 2007

• Torts [view Course Website]
  Liability for intentional or accidental injuries to persons or property. 4 units.

• The Constitutional Law of Incarceration [view Course Website]
  The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 1980, approximately 500,000 people were behind bars in this country. By 2000, this figure had topped two million, incarcerated in jails, state prisons, and federal prisons - nearly two-thirds of whom are non-white. This course will examine the constitutional law relevant to their incarceration. Topics will include the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the prison disciplinary process, felon disenfranchisement, inmate access to the courts, and the law of race discrimination as applied to prisons. We'll also look at Congress's efforts to regulate both prison and litigation brought by inmates, examining constitutional challenges to the Prison Litigation Reform Act and to the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act within prisons and jails. Finally, we'll examine constitutional remedies, studying the law of injunctive relief in constitutional cases brought by inmates. (We will not discuss criminal procedure, habeas corpus, or sentencing.) There will be an 8 hour week-day self-scheduled final exam. 3 units.

Spring 2008

• Individual Rights and The Constitution [view Course Website]
  This course addresses interpretation and enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment, focusing in particular on equal protection (especially the law governing racial equality), due process of law, and state action. There will be an 8 hour week-day self-scheduled final exam. 3 units.

• Civil Rights Injunctions Seminar [view Course Website]
  Civil rights litigation has been of tremendous import in this country, especially since the 1950s, when Brown v. Board of Education produced the first modern civil rights injunction. The settlements and court orders entered in civil rights cases have transformed a huge number of governmental institutions - schools, prisons, mental health facilities, housing authorities, police departments, child welfare agencies, etc. Injunctive civil rights cases have closed some institutions and opened others, dominated budget politics on occasion, become models for statutory interventions, and generally regulated governmental practices. Thousands of such cases have been filed over the past fifty years and new cases are filed all the time; hundreds, old and new, are ongoing and remain influential. But information about the cases has always been somewhat difficult to come by -- a state of affairs that has interfered with the development of public policy. Informational scarcity makes good policymaking and advocacy more difficult, as officials, lawyers, and activists are forced to spend much of their time finding out by word of mouth who else has encountered issues similar to the ones they confront. And, similarly, ordinary citizens are unable to uncover the legal regime in which the governmental institutions that affect them are situated. The same problems undermine good scholarship, as well, when scholars are forced to study only unusual cases because the ordinary ones are so elusive. In this seminar, students will help to solve this problem, by conducting literature and case reviews of their chosen areas of civil rights injunctive practice. (Topics for study will be chosen by the students, but with a good deal of guidance and input by the instructor.) Students will review the caselaw, canvas what scholarly case studies have been done, and work on assembling the universe of cases and understanding the relevant communities of advocates and governmental actors. Each student will begin with a literature review/annotated biblio-graphy and a case catalog, and then move on to a paper about litigation trends and a case study. (Students may pick whether to devote more time to the litigation trend paper or the case study; together they should run 20-25 pages.) After review by the Professor, developed materials may be used for the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, a new web-based resource sponsored by the law school (see http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu). (This seminar is not graded anonymously because the professor works with students on their writing projects throughout the semester.) 3 units.

Materials Written for Student Use

• Torts supplemental reading on gender:
  
  • What would it mean to have a reasonable woman standard
  • Imputed contributory negligence and the relation of husband and wife.
    
• The Difference between Jails and Prisons

Archived Course Websites

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• Empirical Inquiries into Civil Litigation , Spring 2006
• Constitutional Law of Incarceration, Spring 2006
• Torts, Fall 2005 
• Constitutional Law: Individual Rights, Fall 2005
• Prisons Seminar, Fall 2004 

Course Syllabi

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• Constitutional Law of Incarceration, Spring 2006
• Individual Rights and the Constitution (Con Law II), Fall 2005
• Torts, Fall 2005 
• Prisons Seminar, Fall 2004  
• Advanced Constitutional Law: Equality and Discrimination Syllabus, Spring 2004
• Prisons Seminar with Questions, Spring 2004 
• Torts, Fall 2003 
• Constitutional Law 100, Spring 2001 
• Institutional Reform Litigation (Seminar: last taught, Fall 1999)

updated 2007 July 11

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