Const Law II: Equality and Liberty

• Semester: Spring 2020
• Course ID: 381C
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 28735

Description

This advanced Constitutional Law course will examine in greater depth the two clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment that have played a central role in many of the most hotly contested legal, political, and social disputes in the United States today. This course will briefly examine the early development of the Constitution's liberty guarantee and consider how it has evolved in more recent times in cases involving the death penalty, abortion, and gay rights. It will likewise examine the development of the Constitution's equality guarantee, primarily in cases involving race, sex, and sexual orientation discrimination and issues such as school integration, affirmative action, reproductive rights, and same-sex marriage. As we study these two lines of cases, we will consider how the meaning of the Constitution's liberty and equality guarantees has changed over time, and how lawyers and judges do--and should--apply these constitutional provisions to some of the most pressing legal controversies of the twenty-first century.