Subject: Law (Grad) (LAWS)

CRN: 22864

In Person | Lecture

Minneapolis: School Of Law 334

  Teresa Collett

As Judge Jeffery Sutton notes, “Torts, property, and contracts—core staples for first-year law students—focus almost exclusively on state law. The one traditional first-year class that does not consider state law, as it turns out, is Constitutional Law. Yet the first year course teaches just half of the story as it addresses just one constitution—the federal constitution—and ignores [the fifty state constitutions]. As a lawyer responsible to advance a client’s objective, a competent lawyer should consider whether a client’s objectives can be most easily achieved through federal or state grounds. Sometimes the best result can be reached under state constitutional law. The course covers rights and structure, and in both settings, it compares the federal model to the various state models. Of particular emphasis is the role of the state courts in protecting liberty and property rights under their own constitutions, and most notably whether they should construe these guarantees to offer protections that the federal courts have not provided in construing the federal constitution. This gives us the occasion to take up the most active debate in state constitutional law over the last several decades: the responsibilities of state courts when interpreting state constitutional provisions that live in the shadow of their counterparts in the federal constitution, especially the weight to be given to the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretations of the federal provisions. Particular attention will be given to a variety of current issues in state constitutional law, including litigation involving school funding, marriage, property takings, criminal procedure, the free exercise of religion, among others.

2 Credits