Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

Class is limited to 20 students.

This seminar, which has evolved over the four times it has been taught, is identified as "law in context" on the belief that the regulation of abortion in the United States cannot be understood with a grasp of different aspects of American culture. I have been working for the last year on a book called About Abortion. The premise of the book is that so many things in the U.S. are about abortion in great part because abortion is about so many things: medicine, morality, gender, sexuality, politics, and) so on. The course materials will include basic constitutional and statutory materials, as well as selected readings in philosophy, popular culture, and a movie or two. The draft of About Abortion will serve as the skeleton of the course. Chapters (not all of which are completed) include Abortion Privacy/Abortion Secrecy; Teenagers and Abortion, Abortion and the Visual Construction of Loss; Seeing and Believing: Mandatory Ultrasound and the Path to a Protected Choice; Abortion Here and Elsewhere, and Fathers and Fetuses: What Would Men Do. Students will be expected to critique the draft in a collaborative exploration of topics. Students may choose (or be assigned) a particular topic for which they will be responsible (with Prof. Sanger) for class discussion; this will be the subject for which students must prepare an annotated bibliography.

There will be a 15 page research paper on an independent topic of the student's choosing AND a second paper/annotated bibliography related to the course readings. Regular attendance is expected. If a student wishes to write a longer paper for an additional credit, it may be possible to do so.


ADMISSION BY INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION: The seminar is open to ALL second and third year JDs and all LLMs. There are no ideological, political, or other qualifications. Admission is by permission of the instructor. Please submit to faculty assistant Marianne Carroll (mcarro@law.columbia.edu) a current copy of your CV and a brief statement (150 words max) explaining how this seminar fits in with your past, present, or future interests, whether intellectual, professional, or academic. If you are a transfer student and have NOT had constitutional law, please mention this. Continuing JD's who wish to have Prof. Sanger's decision on their request for admission before the June 25 close of the pre-registration period should submit their application materials by Wednesday, June 20. For applications received after June 20, Prof. Sanger will notify students in mid-August, before the August 27 opening of the Add/Drop period.

These are some additional goals:
1. Acquire basic knowledge of U.S. constitutional abortion jurisprudence and that of selected other countries.
2. Acquire thorough knowledge of statutory regulation of abortion and selected regulation of other countries.
3. Acquire in-depth knowledge of a particular abortion-related research topic of student's choice.
4. Create supportive, critical community of common intellectual interest.
5. Review, discuss, and develop transferable skills for writing and critiquing legal scholarship.