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This course focuses on personal injury law, as it has developed within the Anglo-American legal tradition. In particular, the concept of negligence and the refinements of negligence law will be extensively considered. The doctrine of intentional torts will also be examined. Contemporary rules and strict liability will be carefully studied, because of both their intrinsic importance and their theoretical implications. Treating the need for victim compensation as a societal problem, the course will deal with alternatives to the tort system such as no-fault. Throughout the course, there will be an effort to identify the basic purposes which our tort system achieves, or should achieve.

This is a course about the processes that courts follow in deciding disputes in noncriminal cases. It deals with the way in which conflicts are framed for courts, the stages through which litigation goes, the division of power among the various decision-makers in the legal system and between the state and federal courts, the territorial limitations on the exercise of judicial power, the principles that define the consequences of a decision once a court has finished with a case, and the special opportunities and problems of litigation involving multiple disputants. Throughout the course, considerable attention will be devoted to the ways in which our beliefs about fairness (in particular those embodied in the U.S. Constitution) shape the design of the process.

This course examines ways in which the United States Constitution (a) distributes power among the various units of government in the American political system, and (b) limits the exercise of those powers. The course considers two sets of structural limitations on government: the division between the Nation and the States in the federal system, and the separation of powers among the three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial) of the national government. It also considers the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) as limits on the states and as sources of congressional power. A major focus throughout is the proper role of the judiciary in limiting the action of other branches of government.