Course Listings

We explore relations among environmental quality, health, and law. We consider global-scale avoidable challenges such as: environmentally related human illness, climate instability, water depletion and contamination, food and agriculture, air pollution, energy, packaging, culinary globalization, and biodiversity loss. We evaluate the effectiveness of laws and regulations intended to reduce or prevent environmental and health damages. Additional laws considered include rights of secrecy, property, speech, worker protection, and freedom from discrimination.

Facets of contemporary economic globalization, including trade, investment, and migration. Challenges and threats of globalization: inclusion and inequality, emerging global players, global governance, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Analysis of urban life in historical and contemporary societies. Topics include capitalist and postmodern transformations; class, gender, ethnicity, and migration; and global landscapes of power and citizenship.

Is health care a human right? Can health advocacy shape health policy? What does it mean to be a health “activist” and to demand change of medicine? Health care in America has always been political. In this seminar students explore the rich history of health activism and health advocacy in the modern United States, focusing primarily on the postwar period through the present day. Each week we encounter new varieties of grassroots organizing, individual activists, and advocacy organizations that have made political claims about health care and pushed for its reform.

The course will examine legal and policy aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, providing students a comprehensive, integrated sense of whether and how national and international legal systems can address such challenges.

Enrollment restricted to students enrolled in Legal Assistance: Immigrants Rights Seminar. Students must enroll simultaneously in the seminar and fieldwork components of this clinic. Permission of the instructors required. Enrollment limited to six new students.

Course Bidding: Students who are accepted in the seminar component will be enrolled in the fieldwork component. It is not necessary to bid on the fieldwork component.

There are more than 200,000 veterans in Connecticut, many with acute legal needs related to their military service or return to civilian life. In this clinic, students represent Connecticut veterans and organizations in a range of individual litigation and institutional advocacy matters. Individual matters typically include (1) disability benefits applications for veterans who have suffered PTSD, sexual assault, toxic exposure, and other injuries, in the first instance, on administrative appeal, and on judicial review before the U.S.

The Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinical seminar and fieldwork must be taken simultaneously in both terms.

Course Bidding: Students who apply to the seminar section and are accepted will be enrolled in both the seminar and the fieldwork sections. Students should list only the seminar section among experiential course bidding selections. It is not necessary to bid on the fieldwork.

This hands-on mixed methods seminar explores the historical and contemporary experiences of refugees in New Haven. The course examines the historical contexts that have led to the resettlements of different refugee populations in New Haven as well as contemporary issues concerning these communities. Through workshops, students gain qualitative research skills by exploring oral history, archival research, and ethnographic participant observation as complementary methods to document and study refugee communities in New Haven.

How can we study a history so broad, complex, and evolving as the history of American immigration policy?  This course explores that question by studying U.S. immigration law, politics, and activism from the colonial era to the present day.  Chronologically, we particularly examine: (1) antebellum immigration policy in the context of forced migration, settler colonialism, and slavery, (2) the rise of a federal “gatekeeping” immigration regime in the post-Civil War era, and (3) transformations in immigration policymaking and policies during the long twentieth century.

This course introduces students to multiple regression analysis and other tools of causal inference and program evaluation. The course focuses on applying these tools to real data on various topics in global affairs and public policy. Applications are drawn from a wide range of areas including education, social welfare, unemployment, security, health, immigration, the environment, and economic development.

Since 9/11, cases of what has been termed “home-grown terrorism” have cemented the fear that “bad” Islam is not just something that exists far away, in distant lands. As a result, there has been an urgent interest to understand who American Muslims are by officials, experts, journalists, and the public. Although Muslims have been part of America’s story from its founding, Muslims have alternated from an invisible minority to the source of national moral panics, capturing national attention during political crises, as a cultural threat or even a potential fifth column.

This seminar examines the challenges that must be addressed when the fighting has stopped. Once a peace agreement is signed, real deal-making begins. Former rebels negotiate with their military commanders about relinquishing arms and working for a living; communities look for “peace dividends,” refugees weigh options to return home; Governments try to assert authority despite how weakened they have become or new to the role they are; compatriots who opposed the peace settlement relentlessly try to undermine it.

Immigration from Latin America is the one of the most important and controversial issues in the United States today. The family separation crisis, the infamous border wall, and the Dream Act dominate political debate. Latinos—numbering more than 60 million in the U.S.—are a large, heterogeneous, and growing group with a unique social, political, and cultural history.

Four hundred and odd years after colonialism and racial capitalism brought twenty and odd people from Africa to the dispossessed indigenous land that would become the United States, the structures and systems that generate inequality and white supremacy persist. Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, north and south, continue to demonstrate intractable disparities.

Introduction to American political and social issues from the 1940s to the present, including political economy, civil rights, class politics, and gender roles. Legacies of the New Deal as they played out after World War II; the origins, agenda, and ramifications of the Cold War; postwar suburbanization and its racial dimensions; migration and immigration; cultural changes; social movements of the Right and Left; Reaganism and its legacies; the United States and the global economy.

Ever since the US’s founding, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to United States identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, the frontier made possible the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation—democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, the country has a new symbol: the border wall. This course focuses on both the current crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border, which has consumed the country’s attention and challenged its public morality and national identity, and the long history that has led to the crisis.

Examination of the diverse historical and contemporary experiences of people from East, South, and Southeast Asian ancestry living in the Americas, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Organized thematically and comparative in scope, topics include labor migrations, community formations, chain migrations, transnational connections, intergenerational dynamics, interracial and ethnic relations, popular cultures, and return migrations.  

Democracy, liberty, and the sustainable use of natural resources. Concepts include institutional analysis, democratic consent, property rights, market failure, and common pool resources. Topics of policy substance are related to human use of the environment and to U.S. and global political institutions.

Historical roots of contemporary ethnic and racial formations and competing theories of ethnicity, race, and migration. Cultural constructions and social practices of race, ethnicity, and migration in the United States and around the world.

What is Latin America? The large area we refer to as Latin America is not unified by a single language, history, religion, or type of government. Nor is it unified by a shared geography or by the prevalence of a common language or ethnic group. Yet Latin America does, obviously, exist. It is a region forged from the merging of diverse cultures, historical experiences, and processes of resistance. This course provides an overview of Latin America and the Caribbean from the 16th century up to the present.

At a time of rising violence and polarization both within and between nations, what can we learn from the history of nonviolent political action? This course examines the life and the afterlives of Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi, who led India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule. Gandhi’s practice of nonviolent struggle was shaped by multiple influences—by reading Thoreau and Tolstoy, by his experiences as a migrant Indian lawyer and journalist in South Africa, as well as by multiple Indian religious traditions.

A fieldwork option. Prerequisite: International Refugee Assistance Project. Open only to JD and MSL students. Permission of the instructors required.

This seminar will explore strategic and doctrinal issues related to bringing impact litigation to defend and advance civil and constitutional rights in today’s legal environment. The course will draw on the instructor’s decades of experience litigating immigration and civil rights law reform and class action cases in federal courts nationwide as founder and director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights’ Project as well as on service in the Obama and Biden administrations as a senior policy advisor at DOJ and DHS.

The Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinical seminar and fieldwork must be taken simultaneously in both terms.