Critical Race Theory participants will review the multiple ways in which the colorline and the legal system interact, from both a historical and a contemporary standpoint. To this end, we will examine numerous issues concerning racism and justice, including immigration, housing law, voting rights, criminal justice, employment discrimination, affirmative action, and remedies. Participants will complete weekly journals in addition to a term paper. Guest lecturers will appear from time to time. Completion of this course satifies the upper-level writing requirement. There will be no final examination.

Examines major steps in a criminal case from commencement of the criminal action through verdict. Focus is upon federal and New York procedure concerning: the decision to prosecute, including diversion; securing orders and pretrial detention; preliminary hearings; grand jury proceedings; subpoenas, immunity and contempt; accusatory instruments; discovery; speedy trial requirements; venue and venue change; pleas and plea bargaining; jury selection, voir dire and challenges; trial procedures; jury charges; and related practice.

This course and Criminal Procedure Under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments are designed to complement each other in a six-credit study of criminal procedure. Student may elect either course without taking the other.​

Examines basic constitutional constraints imposed on law enforcement in the investigation of crime. Primary topics include search and seizure, interrogation and confessions, right to counsel, fair trial, and self incrimination. 

Professor Breger's class: This course examines - via extensive analysis of landmark federal constitutional cases - the federal regulation of law enforcement investigatory practices including searching and seizing under the Fourth Amendment, compelling confessions under the Fifth Amendment, and deliberately eliciting incriminating statements under the Sixth Amendment. Course themes include controlling police discretion, criminal procedure as Evidence law, class, ethnicity, race, the roles of the lawyers, and the use of social science research.

Professor Farley's class: This course examines - via close readings of landmark federal constitutional cases - the regulation of law enforcement investigatory practices including searching and seizing under the Fourth Amendment, compelling confessions under the Fifth Amendment, and deliberately eliciting incriminating statements under the Sixth Amendment. Course themes will include discretion and ambiguity in the various roles that judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, police, legal scholars, social science researchers and others play in the production of criminal procedure. Class power and racism will also be topics of discussion. There will be no final examination. In lieu of a final examination, each participant will keep a weekly journal and write a term paper.

Professor Bonventre's class: The course examines the constitutional principles governing law enforcement in the United States through the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and of American State Supreme Courts. The course will emphasize the competing arguments, interests, and concerns involved in the various issues and in the different ways in which those issues are resolved by federal and state high courts. Students will be encouraged to understand the evolution, fluidity, and necessarily ideological character of constitutional criminal procedure law, and the importance of studying courts, judges, policy and politics, both to understand the case law and to be competent criminal law advocates. ​

Professor Sundquist's class will include: The intersection of criminal procedure law with evidentiary rules, the impact of bias on the administration of justice, and the role of technological advancements (including DNA data-banking, facial recognition software, digital surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence software for predictive policing and sentencing purposes) on legal conceptions of privacy and individual rights.

Explores in depth the legal issues and discrete phenomena of domestic violence. Topics generally include intimate partner violence, criminal prosecution of batterers, child abuse and neglect, gay and lesbian battering, elder abuse, and the basis for intervention of the state. ​

​The seminar will examine the theoretical and legal treatment of men's and women's labor in the public and private spheres, informal and formal sectors, unionized and non-unionized sectors and the international arena. The seminar is designed for students who are interested in examining the law's impact on the work that women and men do. It will draw on materials from labor history and theory, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, and domestic and international labor and human rights law.

Syllabus-Professor Young

The Health Law Clinic is designed to teach student interns to identify and address the legal issues which poor individuals living with chronic health conditions often face.  Through faculty supervised representation of clients living with, or affected by, HIV or cancer, participating students acquire a broad range of practical lawyering skills in the areas of client interviewing, factual investigation, case planning, client counseling, and litigation advocacy.  Student interns are admitted to practice under the Student Practice Rule which allows them to help clients access necessary health care, obtain public benefits, secure or maintain stable housing, establish court-approved emergency plans for the future care of children, and develop proxies which authorize health care agents to make health decisions.  Participating interns typically take from this experience both a heightened confidence in their lawyering abilities and a broader perspective of their role in ensuring access to justice for the needy.  Clinic clients typically report that the legal services provided relieve stress and allow them to focus their limited energy on their underlying health problems.

Pre/Co-Requisite: None​​​​

Issues in Law and Society: Bread and Roses will focus on the Lochner Era, the Red Scare, the 8-Hour Day Movement, and the theories and practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W. or "Wobblies"). The theories and practices of the I.W.W. will be used as reference points for an examination of present-day legal debates including but not limited to globalization, civil liberties after 9/11, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and problems with prisons.

This survey course will cover historical and contemporary policy debates about poverty in the U.S. Topics will include the constitutional treatment of poverty, as well as the legal and policy treatment of questions of access to specific social goods, such as housing, healthcare, education, and legal services. We will also discuss "hot topics" in the field, such as criminalization of poverty, international perspectives on poverty, wage theft, immigration and access to justice. Materials will include practice-derived materials, contemporary commentary as well as scholarly treatment of the issues. Students with a range of backgrounds and perspectives on the issues are encouraged to enroll.

Race, Rape Culture, and the Law is cross-listed between the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Albany Law School. The seminar will examine the extent to which law and social attitudes contribute to normalizing and/or trivializing sexual harassment and assault against women. The changing social landscape in which rape law in the United States has been defined and enforced exposes both hostility towards women’s dignity and physical integrity, and fear and misunderstanding of black sexuality. This seminar is designed to familiarize students with the fundamentals of sexual harassment and sexual assault law and the ways in which race, gender, and identity are implicated in the legal treatment of these issues. Utilizing case studies and historical examples through the lens of intersectional analyses, this course will address the difficult questions of how to move toward an anti-racist and anti-rape society while also examining the social and cultural causes preventing this progression. This seminar is interdisciplinary and will approach the subject matter through slave narratives, novels, autobiographies, film, music, law review articles, legislation, and case law.

Syllabus-Professor Young

This course examines the legal foundation for states and local governments to incur debt (municipal securities) and finance infrastructure. It reviews the federal law regulating the sale of municipal securities and disclosure requirements for investors, and federal law which permits interest on municipal securities to be tax-exempt. These fundamentals are examined through various financing structures employed by Wall Street investment bankers, together with case law and think-tank policy which guide the development of the modern municipal securities marketplace.​

Students will role-play the justices on cases currently in front of the Court, examine pressing issues in constitutional law from each justice’s perspective, and explore the impact of the justices’ competing approaches both for emerging law and for counsels’ strategy in preparing and presenting cases. The Roberts Court is having a major impact on American law and students will get to see it up close. We plan to go to Washington to observe oral arguments in the cases studied. In past years, students' analyses of the justices have been published.