Civil Procedure and The Social Contract

2 credits

This seminar broadly explores the relationship between classical liberalism and the civil court. Classical liberalism exemplified by the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kantis a theory of government authority that claims that states are only legitimate insofar as their rulership derives from the consent of the governed, to use a phrase from our Declaration of Independence. Because the principles of classical liberalism undergird our American legal system, an understanding of these principles is essential for any normative evaluation of the civil legal system we, as lawyers, work within today. The course will focus on a variety of texts, ranging from philosophy to history to case law. The first part of the course will foreground liberal philosophy itself and explore the way the Court has oriented itself normatively toward these 17th- and 18th-century concepts. Then the latter half of the course will turn to familiar civil procedural doctrine, with a special emphasis on personal jurisdiction. Our inquiry will be philosophical (What makes a civil legal system liberal?), doctrinal (How does the Court employ liberal principles to make decisions in matters of civil procedure?), and historical (Is the American civil legal system and perhaps America itself becoming more or less liberal over time?). This course will require a final paper. No prior philosophical or historical training is necessary, although the course assumes that the student has completed first-year Civil Procedure.