Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professor Eleanor Norton

J.D. Seminar 297 | 3 credit hours (year long)

This yearlong seminar examines problems of statutory interpretation when multiple actors with different roles participate in the development or interpretation of the same language in our unique legal system. Students consider new issues for lawyers raised by the operation of the competitive global, technological economy in our increasingly complex legal system, anchored in a separation of powers government. Unlike most of the world’s governmental systems, decisions by all three branches often are necessary in the United States to achieve legal clarity and closure. In this seminar, we read cases that assist the class in analyzing the gulf between writing and interpreting legislation, the byproduct of our system that often makes for controversial decisions. We search for ways that legislators, courts, agencies and practicing lawyers can avoid the miscommunication that retards compliance and enforcement of laws and results in often needless and costly litigation. During the first semester, students discuss readings from various sources, including cases that illustrate the practical and institutional problems. Students begin the major seminar project, a final seminar paper, with research and work with the professor on an annotated outline to be produced at the end of the first semester. During the second semester, each student engages in the rigor of writing a first draft for a major final paper on any subject of the student’s choosing, sometimes of publishable quality. The paper draws upon one or more seminar concepts developed during the year.

The problem of obtaining legal clarity, at the center of the seminar, is familiar to lawyers and all involved in the legal system. Consequently, students often choose paper subjects that involve lively current legal issues. For example, students have submitted papers, appropriately incorporating seminar concepts, on current subjects as disparate as Proposition 8 and same sex marriage in California and the failure of textualist interpretation of statutes to communicate judicial guidance to Congress concerning executive authority to try and detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo. However, this seminar approaches issues in ways that are only now being confronted by our system. Today, legal clarity and closure are particularly necessary in a technological and global economy demanding immediate answers from the American legal system. This system, however, has changed little since the 18th century except to grow more complicated and time consuming. Most of the democratic governments of the world are organized with less complexity, are less dependent on court decisions, and are able to respond more rapidly than our separation of powers government. The assumption of the seminar is that lawyers, who are major actors in every part of our system, will inevitably encounter these dilemmas and are particularly well equipped to help resolve them, considering that many of the problems that are generated will need resolution in court or with legal assistance. The underlying issues emerge from seminar concepts well known in the law that students discuss as central to the papers they have chosen to write. The seminar is conducted as a group of peers would operate in a law firm, business, faculty, or other workplace setting. Working with the professor, students bring fresh eyes to raise or ask questions after classmates give oral presentations on their outlines and first drafts of the final paper. Class participation is therefore important to one of the missions of the seminar: to accustom students to participating and receiving critiques in peer sessions and improving a work product accordingly.

Students may not receive credit for both this seminar and Legislative and Regulatory Processes: From Inception to Interpretation or Legislation or first year elective or upperlevel course, Lawmaking: Introduction to Statutory and Regulatory Interpretation.

Students should attend class the first week in the fall and spring to obtain class meeting schedule. Class meets alternate weeks.