Prerequisite: None

Exam Type No Exam

This seminar will critically explore the moral underpinnings of constitutional liberties as well as their judicial enforcement. It will first study competing approaches to constitutional adjudication in general—including formalist, realist, Dworkinian, tradition-based, and natural-law accounts. Then, zeroing in on civil liberties, the seminar will consider different philosophical approaches to justifying them. It will also address questions about the ideal scope of specific liberties—and the best methods of judicially enforcing them—by reading rival philosophical and legal treatments of rights claims involving free speech and obscenity, religion and guns, abortion and privacy, and more.