Current Courses

Courses I Teach

• 6040-1 - Civil Procedure
  Civil Procedure, briefly, refers to the body of rules, statutes, and doctrines that govern where and how private suits are initiated, litigated, and resolved by litigants, their attorneys, and the courts. This course has three primary objectives: (1) to provide instruction on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and other procedural rules derived from statutes and legal decisions; (2) to assist you in understanding the political and policy underpinnings for those rules; and (3) to help you begin to apply those rules in “real-life” practice situations.
• 7055-1 - Employment Discrimination
  In this course, we will study one subset of the many regulations and legal principles that affect employment—the federal laws prohibiting employers from discriminating in the hiring, firing and terms and conditions of employment of the members of their workforces. These laws include Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under these statutes, employers are prohibited from treating workers differently on the basis of certain characteristics, including race, color, gender, religion, age, national origin, and disability. Employers may, however, and routinely do discriminate between workers on the basis of other, non-protected characteristics for both good and bad reasons. An important goal of the course will be to understand how the law distinguishes between permissible and impermissible reasons for treating workers differently.
• 7074-1 - Family Law
  This Family Law course focuses on adults and their intimate and sexual relationships – including their privacy interests, their entry into and exit from marriage, their roles and responsibilities in intact families and after family dissolution, and the availability and consequences of “nontraditional” family arrangements. To the extent that adult family members are parents, their roles and responsibilities have implications for children, and this course covers such implications, for example, allocating child custody and child support after dissolution.
• 7800-002 - Sexual Harassment Law
  The purpose of this seminar is to assist and support students in the process of writing a substantial research paper on the legal and social issues raised by sexual harassment. The course focuses on the workplace. However, sexual harassment in a variety of other locations, such as in schools and online, are also explored. We will begin the seminar by studying the background of the #MeToo movement and federal statutes and cases prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace. In the second part of the seminar, we will examine sexual harassment in several specific contexts, such as schools, online, in the restaurant industry, casinos, and among immigrant workers. The final part of the seminar is dedicated to presentations of student research projects.
• 7800-4 - Issues in Family Law Research Seminar
  This is an advanced research seminar for students interested in family law. Broadly conceived, “family law” includes the law of marriage, divorce, child custody, child support, cohabitation, adoption, alternative reproduction, guardianship, paternity, child welfare, domestic violence, reproductive rights, social welfare, juvenile justice, international and comparative family law, and family negotiation and mediation, among other topics. The goals of this course are to introduce you to some of the major theoretical perspectives that scholars use to explain and analyze family law and to help you enhance your legal research and writing skills. We will spend the first three-fourths of the semester examining family law through the lens of various theoretical perspectives. The final quarter of the semester will be devoted to intensive independent research and oral presentations of your research projects. Previous or concurrent experience in family law in the form of course work or clinics is recommended for this seminar, as a basic working knowledge of family law will be assumed.
• 7800-4 - Feminist Legal Theory
  This course explores a type of legal scholarship known as feminist legal theory. Feminist legal theory draws from critical perspectives within other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism to analyze the relationship between law and gender and understand the limits of, and opportunities for, legal reform. Historically, its essential concern was with the treatment of women by the legal system. Over the past three decades, it has developed into a general critique of the role of law in maintaining and perpetuating social hierarchies, with its own set of canons, methodologies, and internal critiques. The course will be organized around the various schools of feminist thought, including formal equality, substantive equality, nonsubordination, cultural feminism, and antiessentialism. During the semester, we will explore these strands of feminist legal theory from a philosophical perspective, as well as apply them to concrete areas of law such as employment law, family law, and the legal profession. The first three-fourths of the semester will be devoted to studying the case book materials. The remaining part of the semester will be devoted to half hour presentations of your research projects.
• IDC - Visiting Professor - The Liberalization of Family Law Around the World
  This course examines the development of family law into a more inclusive, liberatory, equality-driven field of law in the United States and many Western countries -- and the debates this “liberalization” has generated. Topics include marriage equality, unmarried cohabitants’ partnership rights, no-fault divorce, and joint custody of children. Within each topic, we will explore larger issues such as the proper scope of governmental regulation of sex and family, and tensions between liberalization and religion. Competing perspectives (including those grounded in feminist, queer, and critical race theories) and concrete reform proposals will be considered. Readings focus on family law in the United States, with some sources from EU countries and Israel.