This course explores the historical origins of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in immigrant, religious, and indigenous communities in the U.S. and its development over the past 300 years. Why have advocates in the legal, commercial, labor, educational, and community sectors promoted its use? What has their impact been on the various forms of ADR? Whose interests are served by ADR? A critical analysis of mediation, arbitration, negotiation, and online dispute resolution in comparison to the judicial system include attention to how issues of power imbalances and identity impact ADR.

Law assumes facts, creates entities, and conceals aspects of its operation in order to extend or limit the power of courts in deciding cases. Law creates and deploys fictions (e.g. corporate persons, reasonable persons, equal protection, compelling interests) in that endeavor. This social construction of law and legal phenomena may be construed as proper or improper depending upon the power of competing stories and story tellers, as well as how we the audience receives and give life to them.

This practicum course is a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Police Department's Citizen's Police Academy and the Legal Studies program. The Citizen's Police Academy is a combination of in-class lectures and hands-on experiences through which students learn how police officers are trained and how they do their jobs. Among other things, students will learn about the constitutional limits on police power, how crime scenes are processed and how police deal with active threat situations.

Fieldwork experience for qualified students. Coordinated through the University's Office of Internships. Prerequisite: LEGAL 250. Generally open only to Legal Studies majors. Individual faculty sponsorship required.

In this course, we will explore the American constitutional system as prescribed by the United States Constitution, and as developed by the myriad subsequent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court throughout this nation's history. Broadly, we will focus on the areas of institutional powers, federalism, and government involvement in commerce, regulation, and taxation. Across these areas, students will learn about the legal, social, historical, and political contexts in which the Supreme Court reaches its decisions.

This course examines the legal status of women in the United States, focusing specifically on the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the law used gender, sex, sexuality, and race to legally enforce inequality between women and men (and among women)? We will examine the legal arguments feminists have used to advocate for legal change and how these arguments have changed over time, paying specific attention to debates about whether to make legal arguments based on formal equality, substantive equality, liberty, or privacy.

This course traces political and legal struggles over the right to vote and access to electoral power in the United States from the founding to the present, focusing on issues such as the voting rights of people of color and women, the Voting Rights Act, reapportionment, redistricting, voting restrictions such as voter ID laws, and voting expansion measures such as same day registration, early voting, and voting by mail. Throughout, the course focuses on the interaction between law, political institutions, and social movements in struggles over the right to vote.

Not available at this time

Not available at this time.

Not available at this time.