Course Description
Examines the role that lawyers across time and space have played in creating and defending democratic government that respects the rule of law. We will examine the role that lawyers played in insulating the rule of law from the arbitrary exercise of monarchical power, the role lawyers have played since 1900 in defending democracy and the rule of law from authoritarian governments, and evaluate the performance of lawyers in defending these institutions in the United States.
Athena Title
Lawyers Kings Despots Revol
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
After taking this course, students will be able to: • Develop, apply, and critique frameworks for determining whether, and to what extent, a government could be considered politically free. • Evaluate the role that lawyers have played in creating and defending both limited and robust views of what constitutes "free" government, and the role lawyers have played in undermining such governments on behalf of monarchical, fascist, communist, or other authoritarian regimes. • Evaluate important institutional and political factors that influenced whether lawyers defended, or failed to defend, "free" government, understood from both a procedural and substantive way. • Understand and evaluate the role American lawyers have played in creating and protecting minimal and robust visions of free government in the United States.
Topical Outline
I. What role did lawyers in the United Kingdom, France, and other Western European Countries play in creating institutions that defended the rule of law from the arbitrary exercise of monarchical power? This section will identify a minimal definition of the rule of law and democracy, and evaluate the role lawyers played in developing the institutions that define such government. II. What role have lawyers played since 1900 in defending such governments across the globe in response to challenges from communist, fascist, and other authoritarian governments? We may examine the role lawyers played in Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Spain, and Japan in the 1930s and 40s; Argentina in the 1960s, Peru and Chile in the 1970s; and today in China, Venezuela, Egypt, Hong Kong, Hungary, Turkey, and Russia. This section will have three goals: (1) determine when lawyers have defended the minimal view of the liberal state developed in part I; (2) develop a more robust definition of democracy and rule of law that emphasizes substantive rather than procedural concerns; (3) determine when lawyers have defended that more robust understanding of the liberal state; and (4) work to develop a framework for identifying the factors that helped lawyers defend either the minimal or robust visions of the liberal state when they did and prevented them from doing so when they did not. III. Examine the performance of lawyers in defending both the minimal and more robust understandings of free government in the United States. Case studies will examine the role lawyers played in the American Revolution, the expansion of voting rights during the Jacksonian era, abolitionism, the First and Second Red Scares, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Terror, and other subjects.