TEACHING
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Race, International Law, and Empire
This seminar seeks to critically examine the foundation of international law and its production and management of racial difference with an emphasis on whether and how the law can be leveraged for emancipatory purposes.
Human Rights and Legal Remedies
This course is designed to study the impact of the U.S. criminal justice on racial minorities, migrants, and indigenous peoples in the United States through an internationalist framework. This will be achieved by exploring the constituent parts of the criminal justice system: criminal law, law enforcement, courts, juries, and prisons as well as available international legal remedies, including but not limited to, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
George Mason University
Critical Race Studies [INTS 437]
This course engages students in a sociohistorical, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic examination of the forms and impacts of racism, as well as movements for racial justice, in the United States with an emphasis on a critical race studies framework.
Law & Justice [INTS 300]
This learning community will combine various teaching methods including lectures, the Socratic method, case study, discussion of readings and films, debates, and active inquiry-based learning to investigate the major institutions in the American legal system in an effort to examine the ways in which they operate to help realize or confound social justice.
Human Rights/Social Justice [INTS 362]
In this learning community students will consider the philosophical foundations of human rights, explore the interpretive difficulties relating to identifying what constitutes human rights abuses, and evaluate regional perspectives on human rights. Based on deeper understandings of these components of global human rights discourses, students will analyze institutions that strive to promote and enforce human rights standards including the United Nations system, regional human rights bodies, domestic courts, as well as movements. We will also study various human rights issues such as genocide, torture, indigenous rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, labor rights, and women’s rights.
International Human Rights Law and the Middle East
This course is based on the upper level course taught at Georgetown University and modified for an undergraduate student body.
Cornerstones 203: Inquiry Into Action
This course examines the complex interplay between academic research, society’s political and social structures and individual decisions and acts. For educated decision-making is not simply a matter of finding the “right” information. We have to ask ourselves exactly how we “know” what we think we “know” and learn to subvert the cultural and cognitive barriers that can impede even our most dedicated quests for knowledge.
Georgetown University
International Human Rights Law and the Middle East
This course is divided into three sections—1) human rights law in substance and theory; 2) case studies; and 3) practice. It covers the doctrines that constitute international human rights law, the legal fora in which those laws are enforced and/or adjudicated, the controversies surrounding the application of human rights law in the Middle East, and the politics informing the discourse of human rights in the Middle East. Among the themes examined throughout the course are: the objectivity of the law; the universality versus the cultural relativity of human rights; and the impact of international relations on the application of human rights law and accountability for violations.
International Human Rights Law and the Middle East
This course is divided into three sections—1) human rights law in substance and theory; 2) case studies; and 3) practice. It covers the doctrines that constitute international human rights law, the legal fora in which those laws are enforced and/or adjudicated, the controversies surrounding the application of human rights law in the Middle East, and the politics informing the discourse of human rights in the Middle East. Among the themes examined throughout the course are: the objectivity of the law; the universality versus the cultural relativity of human rights; and the impact of international relations on the application of human rights law and accountability for violations.
Temple University, Beasley School of Law
National Security Law
US national security is a vast concept and includes everything from childhood obesity to drug wars between Mexican cartels. This seminar will focus on a specific set of national security threats – those posed to the United States by non-state actors who target US civilians, personnel, and interests with the aim of achieving political change – and examine the legal controversies raised in responding to these threats domestically and abroad. The course will be divided into two parts. Part One will examine legal controversies in constitutional law. This includes the scope of presidential powers in times of heightened national security threats and the separation of powers more broadly. It will also explore the tension between national security and individual liberties during times of crisis. Part Two will shift gears to interrogate the legal controversies raised by irregular combat between the US and non-state actors internationally. This section will be a survey of some of the most pertinent legal issues triggered by the so-called ‘war on terror’, beginning with an exploration of what body of law regulates such non-traditional conflict.
Legal Research and Writing
Temple Law School's Legal Research & Writing program has recently been ranked as #5 in the nation according to the 2014 US News rankings. LRW is a practical course that seeks to teach students how to research and analyze legal issues as well as how to convey that analysis in writing or orally to others. Using a hypothetical fact pattern, the students learn to write an inter-office legal memo in the first semester. In the second semester of this year-long course, they learn how to write a legal brief for submission to a federal court and how to deliver an oral argument.
National Security Law
US national security is a vast concept and includes everything from childhood obesity to drug wars between Mexican cartels. This seminar will focus on a specific set of national security threats – those posed to the United States by non-state actors who target US civilians, personnel, and interests with the aim of achieving political change – and examine the legal controversies raised in responding to these threats domestically and abroad. The course will be divided into two parts. Part One will examine legal controversies in constitutional law. This includes the scope of presidential powers in times of heightened national security threats and the separation of powers more broadly. It will also explore the tension between national security and individual liberties during times of crisis. Part Two will shift gears to interrogate the legal controversies raised by irregular combat between the US and non-state actors internationally. This section will be a survey of some of the most pertinent legal issues triggered by the so-called ‘war on terror’, beginning with an exploration of what body of law regulates such non-traditional conflict.
Legal Research and Writing
Temple Law School's Legal Research & Writing program has recently been ranked as #5 in the nation according to the 2014 US News rankings. LRW is a practical course that seeks to teach students how to research and analyze legal issues as well as how to convey that analysis in writing or orally to others. Using a hypothetical fact pattern, the students learn to write an inter-office legal memo in the first semester. In the second semester of this year-long course, they learn how to write a legal brief for submission to a federal court and how to deliver an oral argument.