Critical Legal Thought/Critical Lawyering

This course introduces students to critiques of the US legal system and explores strategies for moving the law toward more socially just outcomes. The first holf of the course focuses on scholarship critical of current law, including Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and critiques that the law pervasively neglects the interests of the poor.

The second half of the course considers strategies for moving the law toward more socially just ends. In addition to reading material about the relationship between law and social change, and about cause lawyering, students will hear from lawyers implementing sophisticated strategies of legal reform, potentially including those who have worked in the civil rights movement, on death penalty reform in North Carolina, gay and lesbian rights, access to health care, poverty law and consumer protection, using a combination of litigation, legislative reform, and public relations strategies.