Syllabus — home

From Dred Scott to Ferguson, St. Louis has served as a focal point for some of the most important issues in our country’s long and still unfinished work toward racial equality. The law has played an important role in these developments - judicial opinions, city ordinances, and commission reports have shaped how we understand questions of race and equality. But the law is not simply the written word - it involves people, practices, and places, and the stories we tell about them. How we communicate our stories ultimately affects how we understand those stories, and how we understand ourselves. This course situates law within stories and equips students to communicate those stories in ways that draw from a range of methodological tools. Using human-centered design, it challenges students to connect the words of legal documents with the experiences of those whose lives are situated by them.

2-Minute Presentation (I) 10%
Reflection Paper (I) 10% Individual Presentations (I) 10%
Creative Brief (G) 5%
Final Presentation (G) 15%
Final Design Project (G) 20%
Design Project Documentation (G) 10%
Design Group Peer Assessments (I) 10%
Class Participation (I) 10%

Your course grade will be based on a composite of individual (I) and group (G) grades. You will be placed in design groups of with other students, and each member of your group will receive the same group grade.

The Design Project will be a hands-on collaborative effort in which students will apply elemental design thinking principles to create an artifact that re-imagines the way we read a law case. The final deliverable should take into account the ease of user-interaction and comprehension for a wider audience—it may be designed using physical and/or digital media. Students will be assigned to groups. Each group will be given one of the primary cases from the course and be tasked with “filling in the gaps” (narrative, visually, and otherwise) with the goal of producing a web-based educational tool for a general audience.

Community Engagement

This class includes a community engagement dimension. Anyone (including non-students) can join through our community page and participate in the blog discussions.

Attendance and Classroom Policies (for officially enrolled students)

Your attendance and contribution to the discussion are crucial to making this class successful and a necessary part of engaging with the complex ideas that we’ll encounter. We recognize that many of you will have occasional foreseen and unforeseen conflicts, and we will accommodate those at the margins. But you should not take this course if you think you’ll miss a significant number of classes. If you anticipate missing a class, you should notify us at least 24 hours in advance of our meeting.

We will make every effort to respond to your emails within one day of your having sent them, with the exception of emails sent over the weekend or holidays, which we will answer by the following business day.

Students can schedule office hours with Professor Inazu through this link. His office is AB 537 in the law school. You can schedule office hours with Professor Laker by emailing her.

You should feel free to use office hours not only to discuss our substantive readings but also to obtain help on your writing, to ask questions about graduate school or law school, or to talk about other academic or career interests.

We have posted some basic writing guidelines and stylistic preferences. You should familiarize yourself with those guidelines, and we will expect you to follow them for all writing in this course. We also commend to you the additional resources listed on that page.