SMNR: Health & Human Rights Law & Policy

Semester: Fall 2014
Course ID: 397S
Credit Hours: 3
Unique: 29975

Course Information

Course Type: Seminar
Grading Method: Pass/Fail Allowed (JD only)

Registration Information

Upperclass-only elective

Meeting Times

Day	Time	Location
MON	4:00 - 5:50 pm	JON 6.257

Evaluation Method

Type	Date	Time	Location
Paper

Description

This seminar will consider a number of cutting-edge issues in health and human rights law and policy. It will be organized around the visits of leading scholars and practitioners in the field who will come to the Law School to present their research, which will be the focus of the seminar. Students will spend two weeks considering work by each speaker. During the first week, we will meet to discuss the papers the presenters submit in advance in a traditional seminar format. In the second week, the authors will present their papers in a public forum, and will engage in dialogue with seminar students, as well as with others in the university community who choose to attend the talk. Students will thus have the opportunity both to engage in their own critical discussion of the work and to observe and participate in a conversation with the authors in a broader audience. Possible topics for the seminar include: meanings of a human right to health; how the human right to health might attend to social determinants of health; the right to health and social movements; adjudication of the right to health; the right to universal health care; the right to a healthy environment; and humanitarianism and trauma. Students are expected to engage actively in class discussions, to write short critical papers responding to some of the papers presented in the seminar, and to write a longer essay on a topic related to the themes that arise during the semester. The course will be co-taught by Professor Karen Engle (law) and Dr. Stephen Sonnenberg, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is an adjunct professor in the College of Liberal Arts Plan II Honors Program and the School of Architecture. They have previously co-taught a seminar on War, Trauma and Law. The seminar is open to law students as well as to non-law graduate and professional students with relevant background.

Textbooks ( * denotes required )

No materials required

Instructors

Engle, Karen

Sonnenberg, Stephen M.