Modern Conservative Legal Thought

This reading group will consider the application of modern conservative thought to questions of law, regulation, and governance. We will begin with the inquiry: what is conservative thought in the United States in the twenty-first century? We will then consider alternative schools of thought, focusing mostly on progressive thought, but also considering libertarianism as well as critical legal thought. After creating a schema of schools of thought, we will apply these to legal, regulatory, and governance problems. Depending on the pace of the course, we will apply our schemas to topics including the allocation of authority in a democratic republic, constitutional and statutory interpretation, separation of powers, speech rights, association rights, separation of church and state, law and economics, antitrust law, administrative law, and the regulatory state. Enrolled students can opt to write a longer paper for an additional credit, which will satisfy the upper-level writing requirement.

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