= E-reserves;
= Blackboard course materials;
= World Wide Web (hyperlink from syllabus);
= Stokes Library 3 hour reserve; also available for purchase at Labyrinth.
Where to find the readings:
= E-reserves;
= Blackboard course materials;
= World Wide Web (hyperlink from syllabus);
= Stokes Library 3 hour reserve; also available for purchase at Labyrinth.
Week One. February 3 and 5. Introduction: public versus private ordering of institutions .
The first week of the course will lay out two cases aimed at illustrating the principal kinds of institutions the course will consider: (1) publicly ordered institutions (citizenship) and (2) privately ordered institutions within a legal framework (contract). Reserved for later: institutions such as religion and science whose framework of rules is not generally established through law in a liberal political order.
Citizenship:
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21-34 (Ch. 1 "Citizenship as Social Closure").
Contract:
Margaret Jane Radin, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiii-xvii (Prologue) and 1-18 (Ch. 1).
Week Two.February 10 and 12: What are institutions, and why do they matter? Institutional analysis and law.
This week examines different approaches to institutional analysis, institutional change, and legal systems .
February 10: Contrasting disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on institutions
Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chs. 1, 9.
Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields," American Sociological Review 48 (1983), 147-160.
Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Keleman, "The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism," World Politics (2007) 59: 341-54 [first 14 pages only].
February 12: What makes law different?
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Ch. 5 ("Law as the Union of Primary and Secondary Rules"), 79-99.
Carol A. Heimer, "Competing Institutions: Law, Medicine, and Family in Neonatal IntensiveCare," in Erik Larson amd Patrick Schmidt, eds., The Law and Society Reader II (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 265-275.
Week Three. February 17 and 19. Political institutions: states, nations, nation-states.
In this week, we will examine the rise and consolidation of the modern nation-state as both a social and a legal project.
Charles Tilly,"States and Nationalism in Europe 1492-1992," Theory and Society (1994), 23: 131-146.
Paul Starr, "The Creative Reluctance of Liberal Statecraft," in Freedom's Power (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 29-52.
John Henry Merryman and Rogelio Perez-Perdomo, The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America, 3rd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-5, 20-33.
Week Four. February 24 and February 26. Democracy and rights
We now take up questions about the institutional framework of democracy: What role does law play in regulating democracy? What is the nature of rights?
February 24: The design of democracy
Paul Starr, "The Conservative Design of Liberal Democracy," in Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), Ch 4.
Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela S. Karlan, and Richard H. Pildes, "An Introduction to the Design of Democratic Institutions," in The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process, 4th ed. (New York: Foundation Press, 2012), 1-13.
February 26: Negative and Positive Rights
Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, "All Rights are Positive" and "The Necessity of Government Performance" in The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 35-58.
Emily Zackin,Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), Chs. 1, 3.
Weeks Five and Six. March 2, 4, and 9. Rights, civil society, and the limits of state authority
In these three sessions, we consider the rights revolution and counter-revolution, changes in civil society and civic engagement, and the boundaries of state authority in relation to religion and science.
March 2. The expansion and contraction of rights
Robert Cover, "The Origins of Judicial Activism in the Protection of Minorities," Yale Law Journal 91 (1982), 1287-1316.
Adam Cohen, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), Introduction.
Adam Winkler, We the Corporations (New York: Liveright, 2018), Introduction, Ch. 10.
March 4. Civil society and changing structures of civic engagement
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), Chs. 1-2.
March 9. The boundaries of state authority: religion and science
Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies, 2d ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 1-28.
Robert K. Merton, "Science and Democratic Social Structure" in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 604-615.
March 11. Midterm exam.
Week Seven. March 23 and 25. Judicial institutions
We turn to the institutions that shape the legal process, focusing on courts, judges, and judicial review.
March 23: Courts, lawyers, and juries (Paul Frymer)
Marc Galanter, "Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change" Law and Society Review 9 (1974), 95-160.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, "Beware the Fine Print, Part I: Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice," New York Times Oct. 31, 2015; and
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery, "The Fine Print, Part II: In Arbitration, a 'Privatization of the Justice System,'" New York Times Nov. 1, 2015.
Jeffrey Abramson, We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), Ch. 1.
March 25: Constitutional entrenchment, constitutional change, and judicial review
Bruce Ackerman,We the People (1): Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), required:, 40-50 (beginning with "The Shape of the Constitutional Past" in Chapter 2). Optional background: 3-22, 34-39.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, Constitutional Self-Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10-45 (Ch.1).
Week Eight. March 30 and April 2. Institutions and economic growth
This week, drawing on comparative and historical evidence, we consider how institutions, especially those created through politics and law, may affect economic growth, and how economic growth may affect institutions. An additional focus is the effect of differences in family structure and female agency..
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012), Chs. 2-4, 7-10, 14-15.
Sarah Carmichael, Alexandra M. de Pleijt and Jan Luiten van Zanden,
"Gender Relations and Economic Development: Hypotheses about the Reversal of Fortune in EurAsia," Centre for Global Economic History, University of Utrecht (August 2016).
Week Nine. April 6 and 8: Property rights and innovation
Continuing our discussion of institutions and economic growth, we turn to the problems of intellectual property and innovation.
Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Harvard University Press, 2011), 1-22, 94-108 (Introduction, Chs. 1 and 4).
Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy (Basic Books, 2008), Ch. 1 ("The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons").
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin, 2004), preface, Chs. 1-5.
Week Ten. April 13 and 15. Institutional change and inequality
Economic inequality has risen sharply since the early 1970s. What role have law and politics played in that process?
Adam Cohen, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, Ch. 6.
David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Harvard University Press, 2014), 1-5, 28-42, 43-44, 76-92.
April 22. Eclipse of the welfare state?
Paul Starr, "Entrenching Progressive Change," in Entrenchment, Ch 5.
Week Eleven. April 20 and 22. Monopoly power, platforms, and the rise of surveillance capitalism.
The internet was expected to disperse power. We turn now to the ways in which it has concentrated it.
Greg Ip, "The Antitrust Case against Facebook, Google, and Amazon," Wall Street Journal January 16, 2018.
Sanjukta Paul,
"The Double Standard of Antitrust Law," The American Prospect (Summer 2019).
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, "The Definition," 3-24, 63-127, 199-308 (Chs, 1, 3-4, 7-10).
Week Twelve. April 27 and April 29. Democracy at risk
The rise of populist nationalism is shaking the foundations of democracy in Europe and the United States. We turn now to the current crisis of liberal democracy and examine the old question of American exceptionalism in light of contemporary developments.
Aril 27. Democratic backsliding and breakdown
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, January 2018), 1-144.
April 29. The end of American institutional exceptionalism? (final lecture)
Last modified: January 26, 2020.