Reading Seminar: Legal Uncertainty - How to Navigate a Moment of Change

Legal Uncertainty: How to Navigate a Moment of Change explores what happens when the law no longer seems to provide a reliable road map for navigating new realities. In many contemporary domains—artificial intelligence, highway driving, migration, climate change, and our current state of political polarization—events are unfolding faster than the law’s established categories can adapt.

Yet these challenges are not entirely new. This seminar places current problems in dialogue with older texts and traditions to reveal the deeper continuities that link present uncertainties to longstanding human dilemmas. Each week, the course will offer students a different way of understanding both our contemporary challenges and the historical struggles that echo within them. Through readings that move between Cicero’s art of oration and modern media spectacle, Homer and Virgil’s stories of exile and present-day displacement, Hobbes’s reflections on conflict and contemporary democratic backsliding, Holmes’s “path of the law” and current debates over access to public spaces, students will explore how past and present converge in law’s ongoing effort to offer predictability in moments of great uncertainty.

Created as a one-time “pop-up” seminar, this course is designed to respond directly to the urgencies of our current moment and will evolve in subsequent semesters as conditions change. Through weekly discussions, brief written reflections on the readings, and a final presentation, students will develop practical and imaginative tools for thinking through law in moments when established precedents and guideposts no longer seem to apply.