Legal Methods II: International Problem Solving

Course Description. International law is a kind of law that applies beyond the jurisdiction of any state. Governments, civil society groups, private entities, and other actors routinely use it to address problems that, in their view, cannot or should not be addressed by one state alone. This intensive course will introduce students to international law through a problem-oriented approach. Each class session will focus on a different case study (the problem) to explore the legal issues that arise in their social and political contexts, as decisionmakers actually confront them. This problem-oriented approach has three main objectives for the students:

• To examine the issues at stake in some of the world’s most pressing problems and how global actors have used international law to address them.
• To understand the basic architecture of the international legal process. Each case study has been selected to highlight a different aspect of the legal process: the key participants and the terms on which they engage with the law, the arenas in which they apply it, the techniques they use to shape it, and the outcomes and distributional effects that they produce through it.
• To think strategically about the contexts in which the law operates and the opportunities for advancing one’s interests through it. This kind of lawyering requires one to assess not only the law as it is but also the various levers for shaping the law going forward.

The course will consist of a combination of classroom lectures, interactive exercises, and small-group work. Students will be expected to spend at least two hours each day reading and preparing for class, to attend and participate in all of the classroom sessions, and to work independently in their assigned small groups each afternoon. The course will be graded pass-fail, with credit awarded on the basis of the final writing projects, class participation, and attendance.

The legal methods course will be graded pass-fail, with credit awarded on the basis of the final (group) writing projects, class participation, and attendance.