This designation enables the offering of new courses covering emerging legal and practice trends and areas of special interest to students and faculty, as well as permitting development of courses with potential for integration into the ongoing curriculum. TIL courses offered over the last several years include the following:

Advanced Environmental Law: Environmental Law and International Development

This course will explore selected issues in environmental law and policy, with an emphasis on the links between environmental quality and international development in the current era of globalization. Two case studies in domestic environmental law (asbestos disease and hazardous waste disposal) will be used as a jumping off point to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the two major types of environmental law: government regulation and civil justice (tort) litigation. We will then examine emerging international law in the field of sustainable development and transnational litigation (efforts by foreign citizens to sue U.S. courts for injuries arising out of their operations abroad). Other topics include corporate codes of conduct; oil exploration and production in the territories of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Rainforest; and global warming. Students will be evaluated based on class participation and a 20-30 page paper. No prerequisites are required.

Anti-Discrimination Theory: Paradigmatic Challenges to Race-Based Discrimination

The course covers, in depth, discrete issues on anti-discrimination doctrine in the post-Civil Rights Act era, drawing on anti-discrimination theory, which recasts legal doctrinal approaches to include ethnic, language, and national origin-based experientalist constructs.

The course reviews critical race and critical race feminisim scholarship. Students will critique theoretical approaches to race, ethnic and gender based antisubordination and antidiscrimination litigation. In the course students will discuss current and emerging social justice issues, including educational access, affirmative action and fiscal equity; domestic violence and access to services for women of color, including immigrant women; racialized sexual harassment; LGBT issues within communities of color; and race and ethnic-based law enforcement. Students write an independent paper based on an original topic selected by the student.

Civil Pre-Trial Process

Focusing on federal pretrial process - emphasizing motions, motion practice, and pleadings - students consider an overview of the pre-trial process and a more in-depth examination of such areas as complaints, answers, class actions, preliminary injunctions, motions to dismiss, and summary judgment motions. Choosing an appropriate federal case, subject to instructor approval, students assemble a case file and write a paper detailing the course of the case, concentrating on one or more of the important motions made in it. The final course project - designed to enable understanding of the implications of these processes grounded in a substantive context - requires students to choose, assemble, and analyze the record of a recent federal case.

Immigration and Citizenship Law

This course covers immigration and citizenship, citizenship by birth and naturalization, dual nationality, family-based immigration issues (including domestic violence and sexual orientation), employment-based immigration issues, refugees and asylees, legalization, exclusion, and deportation (including post-9/11 restrictions and proposals), focusing all the while on the underlying race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation themes of immigration and citizenship laws.

Latinos/Latinas And The Law: Struggles For Equality

This course explores substantive legal issues which have been the focus of the Latino community's legal rights movements in the United States. Students will discuss the significance to a legal analysis of rights and constitutional guarantees of culture, ethnicity, language, race, gender, sexuality, socio/political, economic and immigrant status, and the histories of national origin subgroups. Substantive issues include criminal justice, education, employment, health, and voting rights. Students will critique the legal approaches taken in struggles for equality and assess the role of Latinos and Latinas in shaping United States jurisprudence. Course materials include cases, legal critiques, and interdisciplinary materials on issues impacting Latinos and Latinas. Grading is based on a final paper on an original topic, class presentation of the final paper, and two short papers critiquing specific reading assignments.

Workplace Health and Safety

What are the laws and legal strategies intended to protect health and safety in the workplace? This course offers a basic introduction to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and related laws, right-to-know laws and laws offering protection against retaliation, workers’ compensation and tort litigation for work-related injuries and diseases, and selected current issues and initiatives in workplace health and safety. Case studies of workplace conditions and injury provide an opportunity for understanding and developing a critical perspective on this highly-regulated area.