Intro to Common Law Reasoning

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will explore the ways in which legal rules that constrain a society are shaped by that society in a Common Law system. The particular vehicle for this study will be major trends in the development of private law (i.e., law governing disputes between two private parties rather than between a private party and the state) in the United States. Most of the examples will be drawn from Contracts (the law of mutual agreements) and Torts (the law compelling compensation for harmful acts), with some reference to adjacent areas of Property law (the law governing people’s relationships with things of value). We will study the process by which judges derive fundamental values to guide the law. We will then examine the ways in which those values, and resulting legal doctrines, shift when conditions in society shift. We will consider the degree to which courts’ claims of independence and neutrality may be sustained and the processes by which courts and other important social forces act upon one another.