Teaching

I’ve taught Torts, Information Privacy, Constitutional Law,
and advanced seminars on law and technology,
civil rights, sexuality and gender, and free speech.

I design websites for each class. Please click on the link in each description to view the course website,
with policies, materials, and an online discussion tool for the entire class to ask questions.

Information Privacy Law

Information Privacy Law is a 3-credit course that offers students an intense study privacy. Here is the course description:

This interdisciplinary course is about us, our data, and the myriad ways in which websites, the government, and even our friends pose threats to our privacy. We will touch on the development of tort, contract, statutory, and constitutional law, and we will address several questions throughout the class, including: How, if at all, can we protect information known to some others? How has technology changed our relationships with each other and with the government? Can traditional privacy rules and laws accommodate today's needs?

We will begin by discussing theories of privacy to which we will refer throughout the entire course. Then, we will discuss issues of privacy and disclosure by the media and by other private citizens. We then turn to informational capitalism, AI, ad targeting, and more. We will always discuss privacy in terms of power. This is not a class for those who are looking to go through a casebook case by case. Nor will we just go statute by statute. We will situate technology, human behavior, and law in its social context, consider the ways in which surveillance burdens marginalized populations, and critically approach new proposals for comprehensive privacy law, all with an eye toward asking questions of power: who has it, who doesn't, and how is the law involved?

A recent course syllabus is available here.

Torts

Torts is a 4-credit course that taught in the fall of a law student’s first year. We cover intentional torts, negligence, and products liability. Each class ends with a review question like those students might see on the Bar Exam. We discuss the answer, and how to answer the question, in class the next day. We also finish every unit with an in-class, practice-based activity–litigating an injury claim, conducting witness interviews, trying to settle a dispute–as well as activities based on real-life scenarios. Here is the course description:

Torts are legal wrongs between private parties: two persons, a person and a corporation, and so on. Examples of actions that could lead to a tort lawsuit are punching someone in the jaw, causing someone to feel intense humiliation, and behaving negligently toward the safety of others. The law of torts does not generally involve the government or the police (it can, though), and it never involves state prosecutors or imprisonment (that's criminal law). Nor does it involve written agreements between two parties (that's contract law). Tort law is the background law of everyday life, so it's perfect for someone like me (a sociologist and a lawyer) to teach and perfect for you to learn (because it's weird and fun and bananas). Torts are cases of alleged wrongdoing in which one private person sues another for damages, i.e., money. It is the bread and butter of the law and it is the arsenal for going after quack physicians, Big Tobacco, and those that invade our privacy. Tort lawyers are, in many ways, social justice advocates. Though, let's be real: only some of them.

So, I am here to teach you the law of torts, yes. Tort law, after all, is on the Bar exam (which we should get rid of, by the way). But I am also here to teach you how to study and learn the law, how to be a law student, and how to think like a lawyer. Through our study of torts, we will learn many lawyering skills, including, but not limited to, how to read a case, identity the facts, parse the relevant facts, note the parties' arguments and develop our own, find the court's holding (or final decision), and evaluate, manipulate, and marshal that holding for the purposes of advocacy. This class will set you up to succeed in every other class in law school.

Technology for Lawyers

The goal of this course is to familiarize lawyers with new technologies so they can understand how those technologies may affect their practice, their clients, and society. I teach the seminar along with a technologist. The first have the class describes a given technology (encryption, artificial intelligence, web security, Tor, data tracking, advanced surveillance techniques, and so on). In the second half, we discuss the law and policy implications of the technology. Readings raise a variety of questions ranging from bias and discrimination to national security to consumer protection.

Constitutional Law

Constitutional Law is a 4 credit course that combines both structure and rights into one semester. Throughout my career, I’ve taught ConLaw as a one-semester course and as a two-semester course. Here is the course description of a recent ConLaw course:

In this course, we discuss the legal, political, and social regime established by the United States Constitution. This course isn't just about the three co-equal branches of government that are supposed to both work together to provide for the general welfare of the public and provide a check on each other's power. It is also about constitutional legal argumentation and, importantly, the ways in which law allocates power through the guise of constitutional interpretation. We will study how our government is set up, how its different parts work together, and the controversies that result. We also study some of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and how the federal courts have interpreted and extended (or constrained) those rights. But this course is only tangentially about structure and rights. It's really about power: who has it, who is supposed to have it, and what they can, cannot, and should not do with it. Constitutions--like all laws--allocate power. We will study the ways in which our constitution allocates power to some and takes it away from others.

Here is a recent syllabus.

Digital Civil Rights

This course, geared toward undergraduate and graduate students outside of law school, covers a range of civil liberties questions in the information age, including free speech, privacy and surveillance, intimacy and sexuality, and automated decision-making. We read from a variety of sources in law and the social sciences. Students are asked to write weekly response papers and engage in a single research project for their final assessment, accompanied by an in-progress presentation to get feedback from their colleagues.

Law, Gender, and Sexuality

This course, which I have taught as both a seminar and a standard podium class, focuses on legal issues facing the LGBTQ+ community. It relies on case studies in employment discrimination, marriage equality, family law, HIV, and incarceration, among others, to tease out how both the law on the books and the law as practiced on the ground create systemic barriers to LGBTQ+ freedom. As a seminar, students learn from practitioners and engage directly with advocacy partners, providing an experiential component. As a podium class, students learn the history, underlying doctrine, and theoretical foundation behind critical law and policy debates about LGBTQ+ rights.