This course will provide basic introduction and exploration of issues involved in a standard criminal jury trial. The course will give students insight and exposure to trial issues including but not limited to jury selection, jury instruction, juror deliberations, jury verdicts and post-verdict sentencing. Students will have opportunities to review current Massachusetts law and standards regarding these issues and participate in class discussions and mock exercises.

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.

Not available at this time

Not available at this time.

In this course, we?ll take a multifaceted approach to studying the interplay between the visual arts and law, with a general focus on US contemporary art and courts. In a practical sense, law regulates art-- as a commodity, as a product of labor, as a part of the market economy-- and in relation to legal concerns such as public order, obscenity, and copyright. Law also protects art and marks the limits of those protections through constitutional questions of freedom of expression. In so doing, the law often struggles with those elusive questions at the core of art: what is art, exactly?

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.

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 explores the intersection between women and the criminal justice system. The nature and extent of women as offenders, as victims, and as professionals in the criminal justice system will be explored, as well as theories related to offending and victimization. Also integral to the course is the relationship between victimization and offending and the intricacies of women's intersectionality with the criminal justice system as offenders, law enforcement and probation officers, correctional personnel, lawyers and judges.

"This course traces political and legal struggles over the right to vote and access to electoral power in the United States from the nation?s early history to the present. In this class, you will explore questions such as: What does the U.S. Constitution say about the right to vote? How is the vote protected ? and left unprotected ? by the Constitution and its amendments? What does the Voting Rights Act do? How did it transform the politics of voting in the United States? Why do many people now believe the Voting Rights Act is in trouble? How does the organization of districts ?