486 Jurisprudence (Nye)

LAW486

Jurisprudence: Deciding Hard Cases

(Nye)

Prerequisite courses: 

Prerequisite for: 

Instructor(s): Professor Hillary Nye

Method of presentation: Seminar

Teamwork: No

METHOD OF EVALUATION:

Participation (30%)

Final Paper (70%)

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Judges are entrusted with making decisions that have extraordinarily important effects on people’s lives. How they should exercise that decision-making power is a perennial and difficult question. We expect judges to follow the law. And yet we also ask them to exercise judgment. In this course we will explore questions about the appropriate boundaries of the use of judicial power.

Some cases have been traditionally thought of as easy cases, and others as hard ones. We will examine what makes a case ‘hard’: is it the particular factual matrix? The fact that these specific circumstances have never previously arisen? The ambiguity of the law? The possibility of more than one permissible answer? Or is it the need to appeal to moral values to decide a case that makes it a hard one? We will then examine theories of how judges should approach hard cases. We will examine philosophical and legal literature on reasons and reasoning, moral deliberation, trust, power, precedent and whether/why it should be followed, and what sort of obligations people have when making decisions in the name of others.

SPECIAL COMMENTS:

We will read philosophical texts, but no prior philosophical training is required, and key philosophical ideas will be explained in class.

REQUIRED TEXTS (IF ANY):

No textbook required. Readings will be posted to TWEN.