Cardozo Law Teaching Guides

Law Teaching Guides

Module 1: Federal Plenary Power & Judicial Deference Module 2: Citizenship & Race Module 3: U.S. Constitutional Due Process & Immigration Law Module 4: Establishment of Religion Module 5: Religious Equality and Nondiscrimination Module 6: Voting Rights Module 7: Corporations & Human Rights Module 8: Mass Incarceration Module 9: Cultural Property, Traditional Knowledge & Trademark Law Module 10: The International Criminal Court Module 11: Reparations Module 12: The Reasonable Person Standard

Module 1: Federal Plenary Power & Judicial Deference

Module 1 traces the origins of the plenary power doctrine and broad judicial deference in immigration law, highlighting the ways in which current law and government policies are a continuation of past treatment of immigrants along identity lines.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Identify the legal and policy rationales for broad judicial deference to federal plenary power through constitutional law in immigration cases.
Assess the Supreme Court’s constitutional rationales regarding noncitizens’ right to due process in light of the implied federal plenary power in immigration law.
Interrogate the role and continuity of identity-based discrimination in U.S. constitutional doctrine in the immigration law and policy context.
Understand the legal and policy distinctions between exclusion and deportation historically and today.

Excerpted and full cases examined are as follows: Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889); Fong Yue Ting v. United States et al (1893); Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952); Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei (1953); Trump et al. v. Hawaii et al. (2018).

Module 2: Citizenship & Race

Module 2 analyzes the underlying justifications for including and excluding certain groups in society from attaining citizenship and the responsibilities that have come with the right to have rights historically and today.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand the context history of race in U.S. citizenship and naturalization, as well as question the way in which the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to apply due process analysis in cases that raise questions of racial preference may contribute to identity-based polarization today.
Interrogate the notion that White is race neutral; assimilable (Northern European, Caucasian) vs. foreign (non-Caucasian).
Discuss the implicit and explicit roles of citizenship, how it is used to restrict rights, and the legal and policy justifications for such restrictions.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Elk v. Wilkins (1884); United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898); Sessions v. Morales-Santana (2017); Ozawa v. United States (1922); and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923).

Module 3: U.S. Constitutional Due Process & Immigration Law

Module 3 examines exclusion and deportation of noncitizens in light of constitutional due process guarantees, interrogating the “entry fiction” doctrine in consideration with U.S. international human rights law obligations—namely, the right to liberty and to be free from arbitrary detention.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand which and under what circumstances constitutional rights apply to noncitizens in exclusion, admission, and deportation proceedings.
Learn the ways in which deportation and exclusion are related to punishment, retroactivity, the meaning of permanent residency, the passage of time, and constitutional liberties.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Wong Wing v. United States (1896); Yamataya v. Fisher (1903); Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei (1953); Landon v. Plasencia (1982); and Trump et al. v. Hawaii et al. (2018).

Module 4: Establishment of Religion

Module 4 highlights the different ways the U.S. Supreme Court has conceptualized the right to religious liberty over time—from belief, to practice, to identity—and highlights the challenges the Court has faced in determining what qualifies as “establishment” of religion per the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand and assess the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving application of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses to determine how they interact with each other and what such interactions state about the nature and boundaries of religious liberty in various contexts.
Explore whether courts view religious liberty as protective of a set of beliefs, practices, or identities and what each of these approaches means for the level of constitutional protection that courts are willing to extend to individuals and institutions.
Interrogate various arguments and theories regarding what “neutrality” requires under the First Amendment, and what this means for the relationship between government and religion.
Gain a broader understanding of how religious liberty affects the relationship between government and religion, majority-minority dynamics, social cohesion, and public and private discrimination.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014); American Legion v. American Humanists Association (2019); and Mitchell v. Helms (2000).

Module 5: Religious Equality and Nondiscrimination

Module 5 examines the Court’s developing jurisprudence on the right to religious equality and nondiscrimination, exploring the underlying rationales that federal courts have used to delineate the contours and boundaries of religious liberty with an eye toward understanding the relationship between government and religion, majority-minority dynamics and social cohesion, and public and private discrimination on account of religious beliefs, practices, and identities.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand and assess the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving application of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses to determine how they interact with each other and what such interactions state about the nature and boundaries of religious liberty in various contexts.
Explore whether courts view religious liberty as protective of a set of beliefs, practices, or identities, and what each of these approaches means for the level of constitutional protection courts are willing to extend to individuals and institutions.
Analyze developing jurisprudence on religious equality and nondiscrimination to determine whether the Court is moving toward identifying a new right, or simply reconceptualizing the relationship between the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses.
Gain a broader understanding of how religious liberty affects the relationship between government and religion, majority-minority dynamics, social cohesion, and public and private discrimination.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Trinity Lutheran Church of Colombia v. Comer (2017); Trump et al. v. Hawaii et al. (2018); and Dunn v. Ray (2019).

Module 6: Voting Rights

Module 6 explores the U.S. constitutional law doctrine in the context of voting rights, especially in light of the historical and present disenfranchisement of certain groups along identity lines, tracing deliberate efforts of both non-state and state actors to intimidate African Americans from voting following the implementation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments at the end of the Civil War and the start of Reconstruction as well as exploring the Native Americans’ suffrage movement in light of evolving citizenship rights.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Assess the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional rationales related to voting rights.
Understand how states employ various legal measures to dilute or outright deny voting rights to minority groups in the United States.
Interrogate the different levels of scrutiny applied to U.S. Supreme Court voting rights cases.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966); Kramer v. Union Free Sch. Dist. No. 15 (1969); Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. (2008); Reynolds v. Sims (1964); Richardson v. Ramirez (1974); and Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

Module 7: Corporations & Human Rights

Module 7 examines the challenges of overcoming the limited liability of corporations and holding them accountable for human rights violations, assessing the utility of internal corporate regulatory mechanisms to prevent corporate human rights abuses and evaluating the international and domestic legal frameworks that pertain to corporations and human rights for providing redress to individual victims harmed by corporate actors.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand the jurisdictional challenges of holding transnational corporations accountable for human rights violations abroad.
Discover how corporations have internal mechanisms by which their human rights conduct along with such conduct of their subsidiaries is subject to regulation and oversight.
Learn the different international and domestic policies that are often invoked in the pursuit of offering victims of human rights abuse access to a judicial remedy against corporations.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014); Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petro. Co. (Shell) (2013); Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC (2018); RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Cmty. (2016); and Mohamad v. Palestinian Auth. (2012).

Module 8: Mass Incarceration

Module 8 focuses on the issue of mass incarceration in the United States and the evolution of criminal procedure law and policing practices that have contributed to this phenomenon. While examining the evolution of the probable cause standard into the more subjective reasonable suspicion standard, this module posits various ways that the latter can lead to increased incarceration rates and the overrepresentation of minority communities in U.S. prisons.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand the “probable cause” standard, as well as its slow erosion through Fourth Amendment case law.
Contextualize and problematize the “reasonable suspicion” standard.
Be able to understand the relationship between the increasing use of the reasonable suspicion standard and increased incarceration rates.
Contemplate the way in which court decisions and the general evolution of “stop and seizure” jurisprudence can perpetuate discrimination.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: Terry v. Ohio (1968); Illinois v. Wardlow (2000); and United States v. Mendenhall (1980).

Module 9: Cultural Property, Traditional Knowledge & Trademark Law

Module 9 explores trademark law doctrines in the context of intellectual property law and policy, examining the ways in which Western thought and culture has influenced the structures that create the framework for the trademark law regime, and the ways in which cultural property and traditional knowledge fit, or fail to fit, into that system.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand how the trademark regime fails to take into consideration the unique nature of cultural property and traditional knowledge, and the impact that failure has on marginalized communities.
Compare the effect of the intellectual property regime on cultural property and traditional knowledge with the rationales and motivations for granting intellectual property rights through trademark.
Question the potential role of the global community in influencing the behaviors of those looking to secure intellectual property rights.

Excerpted and full case examined is: Matal v. Tam (2017). This module also analyzes the Lanham Act.

Module 10: The International Criminal Court

Module 10 explains the establishment of the International Criminal Court and its role as a preventative institution as well as the award of reparations.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand the origins, basic history and development of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Assess the ICC as an institution in the context of atrocity prevention and evaluate the various rationales put forward by its proponents.
Problematize some of the underlying assumptions and apply a critical lens to the ICC’s capacity to deter perpetrators of mass atrocities, to timely intervene in situations of atrocity crimes commission, to provide stability for populations in post-atrocity contexts, and to set norms for global atrocity prevention.

This module includes the following suggested readings: Lubanga Order for Reparations; Rome Statute; and, “From Punishment to Prevention Reflections on the Future of International Criminal Justice,” by former President of the ICC Judge Sang-Hyun Song.

Module 11: Reparations

Module 11 explores the ways in which reparations, whether compensatory or symbolic, may offer restitution and restorative justice to the Black community in the United States. Tort legal theory is utilized to present an understanding, framework, and establishment of the causal link between the enslavement of Black Americans and the ongoing systemic racism, injustice, and inequality that Black Americans face today.

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Understand the term “reparations” and learn about their use in redressing past atrocities.
Contextualize and problematize the nature of a tort claim that seeks to redress the harms of slavery.
Learn about previous unsuccessful claims for slavery reparations and ponder different methods that Black Americans can use to achieve redress for atrocities suffered.
Analyze other contexts where U.S. courts have weighed in on reparations, including Japanese internment and Native American genocides, and connect these to current and historical claims for slavery reparations.
Contemplate how racism and discrimination have served as a barrier to effective redress for the atrocities of slavery in the U.S. context.

Excerpted and full cases examined are Cato v. United States (1995) and In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation (2006).

Module 12: The Reasonable Person Standard

Module 12 explores the “reasonable person” standard in U.S. criminal law as it relates to the establishment of particular defenses. Specifically, the module intends to critically question what “reasonableness” means, and how the implied notion of “objectivity” excludes segments of society and certain identity groups at the outset, while accounting for historical and present violence and inequalities. Specifically, the module deconstructs implicit notions on gender, race, and disability in the reasonable person standard as it is applied to self-defense and policing.

Using this law teaching guide enables students to:

Understand the emergence and context of the “reasonable person” standard in criminal law against the background of structural inequalities, such as those based on gender, race, and disability.
Contemplate the broader implications for subjective versus objective determinations of “reasonableness.”
Problematize the “reasonable person” standard as applied in self-defense arguments.
Understand different interpretations of the “reasonable person” standard and these interpretations’ roles in discussions about use of force, including deadly force.

Excerpted and full cases examined are: People v. Goetz (1986); People v. Matthews (1994); and United States v. Peterson (1973).

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Law Teaching Guides

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Law Teaching Guides

Open Access Course Resources for Professors

Confronting Structural Violence:Law Teaching Guides

Law Teaching Guides

Module 1: Federal Plenary Power & Judicial Deference

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 2: Citizenship & Race

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 3: U.S. Constitutional Due Process & Immigration Law

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 4: Establishment of Religion

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 5: Religious Equality and Nondiscrimination

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 6: Voting Rights

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 7: Corporations & Human Rights

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 8: Mass Incarceration

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 9: Cultural Property, Traditional Knowledge & Trademark Law

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 10: The International Criminal Court

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 11: Reparations

Using this Law Teaching Guide enables students to:

Module 12: The Reasonable Person Standard

Using this law teaching guide enables students to:

Fill out this form to download any of the Law Teaching Guides, Free of charge.

The Cardozo Law Institute inHolocaust and Human Rights

Interested in learning more about Cardozo’s Law Teaching Guides?

Connect with Cardozo

Confronting Structural Violence:
Law Teaching Guides

The Cardozo Law Institute in
Holocaust and Human Rights

Interested in learning more about
Cardozo’s Law Teaching Guides?