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The Private Sector’s Pivotal Role in Combating Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is big business, with industry estimates running in the billions of dollars annually. Much of that profit accrues to traffickers, illegal profiteers, and organized crime groups. However, the private sector-including legitimate businesses and industries-also reaps economic benefits, directly and indirectly, from the trafficking and related exploitation of persons…
Law School for Poets
Like many who attend law school, I was an undergraduate history major. The humanities, my college pre-professional advisor assured me, were ideal preparation for the rigors of law school. I believed the hype. Three years later, on my first day of Contracts, my blind faith in…
Teaching Property Law and What It Means to Be Human
Why do I include films, art and novels in the study of property law? The reason for this, as I argue in this Essay, is quite simple. I contend that deploying these materials in the classroom deepens my students’ understanding of property law. The study of property law…
Teaching Humanities Softly: Bringing a Critical Approach to the First-Year Contracts Class Through Trial and Error
I began teaching Contract Law in 1997, and because I wanted my students to benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, I chose a wonderful casebook edited by Amy Kastely, Deborah Waire Post, and Sharon Hom, called Contracting Law. Rather than…
Integrating Humanities into Family Law and the Problem with Truths Universally Acknowledged
I spend a full month on marriage in Family Law, and I use a fair range of what I’ll call “extrinsic evidence” from the humanities. Because there is so much one could use, I am fairly strict with myself about what I do use. It seems important that when we take the time to…
Excavating Subtexts and Integrating Humanity in Civil Procedure
I am currently in my fifth year as a law professor at Drexel University, where I teach Civil Procedure, Jurisprudence, and a Literature & the Law seminar. While Jurisprudence and Literature & the Law are fields arising directly out of the humanities, Civil Procedure…
Role, Identity, and Lawyering: Empowering Professional Responsibility
The Professional Responsibility course has the potential to have the greatest impact on our students’ futures in the profession. Paradoxically, however, it remains one of the most undervalued courses in most law school curricula. The complexity of teaching…
Dick Wolf Goes to Law School: Integrating the Humanities into Courses on Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Evidence
My assignment for this symposium is to discuss ways of integrating the humanities into the core law school courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence—what you might call the Dick Wolf courses. In one respect the topic is trivial and almost…
Incorporating Literary Methods and Texts in the Teaching of Tort Law
Tort law is frequently taught in terms of economic concepts: efficiency, capture, cost distribution, risk allocation, and so on. Alternatively, or in parallel, a philosophical perspective may wend its way into the first-year tort curriculum through discussions of…
Guilt, Greed, and Furniture: Using a Mel Brooks Film to Teach Dying Declarations
When I teach the dying declarations hearsay exception in my Evidence course, I always show the opening scene from Mel Brooks’s darkly comedic film, The Twelve Chairs. A film clip is a particularly dense piece of storytelling, in that it presents story…