Courts Inside Out

In this seminar, we will read and think about courts as key political, economic, and social institutions within the United States. Rather than focusing on particular opinions or modes of judicial reasoning, we will focus on what the courts do. Students will be asked to read law review articles, write short papers, make a short presentation and/or sit in on local court proceedings.

We will attempt to understand the role of courts beyond the tropes of ‘constitutional crisis,’ within the authoritarianism of our times. How should we think about courts in relation to concentrated executive and economic power on the one hand, and diminished legislative and administrative power on the other? While we will examine federal courts and how they have been reshaped in the last half century as a place hostile for plaintiffs, we will place our emphasis on the courts that millions of working-class and poor people encounter every day, not by choice but conscription, as defendants. This includes criminal court, housing court, immigration court, and family court.  

We will aim to understand courts within a neoliberal capitalist state, identifying common features across courts: for example, the reliance on policing, the tendency toward debt collection and regressive taxation, and the forcible movement of people in and out of familiar space (as through eviction, deportation, incarceration, and family separation).