Dates: Fridays, May 5 & 12, 2023
Time: 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Place: ISU, Cunningham Memorial Library, Room 028
Cost: $10

Could this term of the US Supreme Court be more dramatic than last year? It is hard to imagine but with a docket from race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard College to “transformative” visual arts in the marketplace, it certainly will be contentious. Add to these the prospect of highly-charged arguments over “originalism” and the addition of the first Black woman justice and we can expect to see the Court in the spotlight again as we come close to the end of the 2022-2023 term when the most potentially inflammatory decisions will be announced.

The class will start with a review of the federal court system and the role the Constitution gave to the highest judicial body posing the perennial question: How did the Supreme Court garner so much power when its origin story is so modest? Armed with historical context, we will proceed to probe the contributions of landmark cases over the Court’s 300 plus years of decision-making before launching into a dissection of select disputes from the 60 or so cases the Justices will deliberate this term. A combination of lecture, discussion and film clips will accompany our journey into the world of the Judicial Branch of the United States. Materials will include the US Constitution, Court
decisions and handouts on the structure of the federal court system, historical chronologies of Court decisions and a glossary of legal terms.