Prerequisites: Students must have taken or be concurrently enrolled in either Title IX: Sports, Sex and Equality on Campus or Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice. Students who have not fulfilled this requirement but who have other experience working with issues related to gender violence must obtain the instructor’s permission in order to enroll in this course.

Exam Type: No Exam

In this advanced seminar, students will have the opportunity to develop legal policy on a set of current, cutting-edge issues in the field. Primary areas of scholarship include (but are not limited to) the prevention and response to campus sexual assault; preventing intimate partner homicide, especially in marginalized communities; and promoting the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people as we work to prevent gender-based discrimination and violence overall.

Participants will identify an area of interest in the first two weeks of class to delve into for the rest of the semester. Then, working in pairs, they will convene a panel discussion over Zoom with legal experts from the field for the class. Finally, each student will produce “white papers” (policy papers) that build off the panel discussion they created of 10 to 12 pages in length suitable for posting on the Gender Violence Program website. Additionally, each student will write one or two blog posts on various topics related to gender-based violence as the semester progresses. This course offers a highly cooperative environment for student-to-student learning and the opportunity to gain analytic skills in legal policy development.