The Bill of Rights: An Introduction to Constitutional Law

Course Description

This course is designed to enable students to think as informed citizens about some of the most important and enduring issues of United States Constitutional law.

Students are introduced to the main debates leading up to and the current state of the law regarding the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. Throughout the course, students focus primarily on case law but are also exposed to the various political and legal debates around each topic.

The course begins with a discussion of the Constitutional history that led to the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Students then focus on some of the most well known individual rights by reading the seminal Supreme Court cases and discussing the prevailing legal doctrine related to each of these rights. The course concludes with an analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment in the context of the Civil War and examines how the amendment changed the scope and application of the Bill of Rights.

Classes are structured with lecture sessions (usually in the morning) and various classroom activities (usually in the afternoon). These activities involve team debates related to topical issues relevant to the course, mock trials in which students prepare and argue legal briefs based upon the case laws they have studied, and mock legislative sessions which require students to prepare and defend legislative solutions to hypothetical problems.

Instructor