Legal Conflict in Modern American Society

Thousands of lawsuits are filed daily in the state and federal courts of the United States. The disputes underlying those lawsuits are as messy and complex as the human, commercial, cultural and political dynamics that trigger them, and the legal processes for resolving those disputes are expensive, time-consuming and, for most citizens, seemingly impenetrable. At the same time law and legal conflict permeate public discourse in the United States to a degree that is unique in the world, even among the community of long-established democracies. Online and print media covering national and local news, business, sports and even the arts devote an extraordinary percentage of available "column space" to matters of legal foment and change, and those matters - - and the discourse around them - - shape our political, commercial and cultural lives, as well as the law itself. The overarching objective of the course is to prepare our undergraduates students to participate constructively in that discourse by providing them with a conceptual framework for understanding both the conduct and resolution of legal conflict by American legal institutions, and the evolution of - - and values underlying - - the substantive law American courts apply to those conflicts. This is, at its core, a course in the kind of legal or litigation "literacy" that should be expected of the graduates of first-tier American universities.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU Eth; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Legal Conflict in Modern American Society

PHILOSOPHY 3507

Section 01