LAW 7131 :
Justice and Rights

Restrictions: First Year Elective - Registrar's Office sends information about 1L elective registration in October. Spring semester registration for 1L electives begins in November. Law students encounter the concepts of justice and rights throughout the law school curriculum, and this course seeks seeks (1) to introduce law students to the tradition of reflection on justice and rights in Western political theory and (2) to illuminate how such reflection enters and corrects legal practice. By critically examining the works of classical and modern authors, the course will explore such topics as the nature of the state and its powers, political authority and its limits, constitutionalism, unjust laws and civil disobedience, distributive justice and human capabilitites, democracy, and human happiness, freedom and equality, positive and negative rights, love and forgiveness, the common good, and the place of God and religion in political discourse and lawmaking. The objectives is designed to help students understand and evaluate some of the most important questions in the history of political theory; the course is also designed to encourage students to reach their own reasoned positions on these questions as they relate to the law today. Among the authors regularly studied in the course are Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., Martha Nussbaum, Martha Minow, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Exam Info: Exam administered during exam period.