21H.224
Law and Society in US History
Spring 2003
Topics
- Introduction: What is Law? What is the Constitution?
- Same as above
- The Constitution and Judicial Review
- Property Rules in the New Nation
- Property and Equality before The Civil War
- Equality: The Strange Career of the 14th Amendment
- Property: The Fall and Rise of Regulation
- Liberty: Modernizing the First Amendment
- Liberty: Freedom of (and from) Religion
- Equality: The Warren Court and Substantive Due Process
- Liberty: The Warren Court and Implied Liberties
- Equality: The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action
- Equality: Other Suspect Classifications
- Liberty: Conservative Constitutionalism
- Conclusions: The Constitution after September 11th
- Final Examination, two hours duration
Readings
- Hall, Kermit, et al., eds. American Legal History: Cases and Materials . 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Garraty, John A., ed. Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution . 2nd ed. New York: Perennial Library, 1987.
- Horwitz, Morton J. The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice . New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
- Greenberg, Ellen. The Supreme Court Explained . New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
- The Constitution .
- Adams, Abigail. “Correspondence with John (1776).” In The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation . Edited by Diane Ravitch. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1990, pp. 30-32.
- Benedict, Michael Les. “The Supreme Court and Conservative Constitutionalism.” In The Blessings of Liberty: A Concise History of the Constitution of the United States . Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1996, pp. 356-366 and 369-387.
- Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. “‘The Speech We Hate’: The Romantic Appeal of First Amendment Absolutism: Does Defending Nazis Really Strengthen the System of Free Speech?” In Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment . New York: New York University Press, 1997, pp. 149-162.
- Dionne, Jr., E. J., and William Kristol, eds. Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary . Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
- Filene, Peter G. In the Arms of Others: A Cultural History of the Right-to-Die in America . Chicago, Ill.: I.R. Dee, 1998, pp. 11-46.
- Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made . New York: Pantheon Books, 1974, pp. 25-49.
- Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women . New York: New York University Press, 1991, pp. 27-31, and 377-382.
- Irons, Peter. “Gordon Hirabayashi v. United States.” In The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court . New York: Penguin, 1990, pp. 37-62.
- Johnson, Lyndon. “Howard University Address.” In The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation . Edited By Diane Ravitch. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1990, pp. 340-342.
- Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law.” In The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories . New York : Schocken Books, 1988/1948, pp. 148-150.
- Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” In The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories . New York : Schocken Books, 1988/1948, pp. 191-227.
- Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America . Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, pp. 137-155.
- Kingston, Maxine Hong. “‘The Laws,’ from China Men (1980).” In The Faber Book of America . Edited by Christopher Ricks and William L. Vance. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992, pp. 432-437.
- Leonard, Arthur S. “From Bowers v. Hardwick to Romer v. Evans: Lesbian and Gay Rights in the U.S. Supreme Court.” In Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights . Edited by John D’Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 57-77.
- Leuchtenburg, William E. “The Constitutional Revolution of 1937.” In The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt . New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 213-236.
- Mackinnon, Catharine A. “Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Descrimination.” In Sexual Harassment: Issues and Answers . Edited by Linda LeMoncheck and James P. Sterba. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 42-49.
- Marshall, Thurgood. “Reflections on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.” Harvard Law Review 101, no. 1, November 1987, 1-5.
- Meese, Edwin. “A Jurisprudence of Original Intention (1985).” In Sources in American Constitutional History . Compiled by Michael Les Benedict. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1996, pp. 249-253.
- Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 . 3rd. ed. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 129-156.
- Parker, Alison M. Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 . Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997, pp. 134-157.
- Polenberg, Richard. “Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Clear and Present Danger.” In Major Problems in American Constitutional History . Edited by Kermit L. Hall. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1992, pp. 174-182.
- Rehnquist, William H. All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime . New York: Knopf, 1998, pp. 184-211 and 218-225.
- Schultz, Vicki. “Sex Is the Least of It: Let’s Focus Harassment Law on Work, Not Sex.” In Sexual Harassment: Issues and Answers . Edited by Linda LeMoncheck and James P. Sterba. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 269-273.
- “The Slaves’ Appeal to the Royal Governor of Massachusetts (1774).” In The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation . Edited by Diane Ravitch. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1990, pp. 16-17.
- Strum, Philippa. When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate . Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas, 1999, pp. 1-35.
- Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. Rev. ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995, pp. 89-101.
- In re Debs , 294 U.S. 564 (1895).
- Palko v. Connecticut , 302 U.S. 219 (1937).
- United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses,” 8 F.Supp. 182 (1933).
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗Historical OpenCourseWare
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.