Despite promises made by presidential candidates, the President has no direct power to pass any legislation. This very important power lies solely with the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Constitution specifically grants Congress its most important power — the authority to make laws. A bill, or proposed law, only becomes a law after both the House of Representatives and the Senate have approved it in the same form. The two houses share other powers, many of which are listed in Article I, Section 8. These include the power to declare war, coin money, raise an army and navy, regulate commerce, establish rules of immigration and naturalization, and establish the federal courts and their jurisdictions.

The American Revolution began the process of creating a new nation in a number of different ways; by protesting British rule through legal and extra-legal actions; by waging a war to end America's status as a colonized territory; and by designing new forms of government for what Patriots hoped would become independent states.

A framework for a new and stronger national government had been crafted at the Philadelphia Convention by a handful of leaders. But how could their proposed system be made into law?

No protesting the government? No immigrants allowed in? No freedom of the press. Lawmakers jailed? Is this the story of the Soviet Union during the Cold War? No. It describes the United States in 1798 after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

California was admitted to the Union as the 16th free state. In exchange, the south was guaranteed that no federal restrictions on slavery would be placed on Utah or New Mexico. Texas lost its boundary claims in New Mexico, but the Congress compensated Texas with $10 million. Slavery was maintained in the nation's capital, but the slave trade was prohibited. Finally, and most controversially, a Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring northerners to return runaway slaves to their owners under penalty of law.

At the dawn of the 20th century, nine out of ten African Americans lived in the South. Jim Crow laws of segregation ruled the land. The Supreme Court upheld the power of the Southern states to create two "separate but equal" societies with its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson opinion. It would be for a later Supreme Court to judge that they fell short of the "equal" requirement.

Hammurabi is the best known and most celebrated of all Mesopotamian kings. He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. Although he was concerned with keeping order in his kingdom, this was not his only reason for compiling the list of laws. When he began ruling the city-state of Babylon, he had control of no more than 50 square miles of territory. As he conquered other city-states and his empire grew, he saw the need to unify the various groups he controlled.

Three years after the Supreme Court declared race-based segregation illegal, a military showdown took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine black students attempted to attend the all-white Central High School on September 3, 1957.

Slaves did not accept their fate without protest. Many instances of rebellion were known to Americans, even in colonial times. These rebellions were not confined to the South. In fact, one of the earliest examples of a slave uprising was in 1712 in Manhattan. As African Americans in the colonies grew greater and greater in number, there was a justifiable paranoia on the part of the white settlers that a violent rebellion could occur in one's own neighborhood. It was this fear of rebellion that led each colony to pass a series of laws restricting slaves' behaviors. The laws were known as slave codes.

What does “civil rights” mean in the Trump era? How and why is the category evolving? This Teach-Out focuses on the civil rights aspects of two current debates–health care and the President’s seven-country travel ban–looking at politics, protest, and law. To understand these better, you will learn about foundational civil rights history dating back to Reconstruction (after the Civil War). You will also hear the perspectives of scholars in law, sociology, and political science, as well as civil rights advocates, who will all discuss how civil rights are defended and contested, often growing and contracting in response to other demands and debates. This Teach-Out ends with a call to action for you: How will you participate as our nation defines our rights?

This course will acquaint the student with some of the ancient Greek contributions to the Western philosophical and scientific tradition. We will examine a broad range of central philosophical themes concerning: nature, law, justice, knowledge, virtue, happiness, and death. There will be a strong emphasis on analyses of arguments found in the texts.

Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.

Role of the engineer as patent expert and as technical witness in court and patent interference and related proceedings. Rights and obligations of engineers in connection with educational institutions, government, and large and small businesses. Various manners of transplanting inventions into business operations, including development of New England and other US electronics and biotech industries and their different types of institutions. American systems of incentive to creativity apart from the patent laws in the atomic energy and space fields. For graduate students only; others see 6.901.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern whites used violence, economic exploitation, discriminatory laws called Black Codes, and political disenfranchisement to subjugate African Americans and undo their gains during Reconstruction. Kansas and other destinations on the Great Plains represented a chance to start a new life. Kansas had fought to be a free state and, with the Homestead Act of 1862, the region offered lots of land at low cost. As a result, between the late 1870s and early 1880s, more than 20,000 African Americans left the South for Kansas, the Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere on the Great Plains in a migration known as the “Great Exodus.”

Students will examine historical photographs and a data table related to 19th-century industrialization and child labor. They will observe and analyze the primary sources and ask questions. This activity could be used near the beginning of a unit on industrialization or the Progressives.

This unit asks students to consider the permissible restrictions schools can place on students’ freedom of speech, as they learn about the (fictional, but realistic) case of Davis v. Ann Arbor School Board. Students will either conduct a mock negotiation in which they will try to resolve a First Amendment-related conflict between a student and his public high school, or a mock argument in which they will argue for one side in front of a panel of student judges.

This Unit contains 9 lessons:
Lesson 1: Are schools permitted to limit students’ First Amendment freedom of speech?
Lesson 2: Under what circumstances may a school punish student speech?
Lesson 3: How does the law apply to our case?
Lesson 4: What are the key elements of negotiation?
Lesson 5: How can parties use negotiation to achieve the best solution?
Lesson 6: Is negotiation an effective tool in the legal process?
Lesson 7: What is a mock argument?
Lesson 8: How do I prepare for a mock argument?
Lesson 9: How do attorneys conduct oral arguments to advocate for their clients?

Through most of U.S. history, women had limited access to educational programs and extracurricular activities. Most women were excluded from elite academic institutions, and those schools that accepted female applicants required them to have higher test scores and grades than their male counterparts. In the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights activists advocated for federal enforcement of equal opportunities for male and female students. In response, Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This unit asks students to consider the scope and application of Title IX through the examination of statutory text, federal regulations, enforcement policies, and court decisions. Students are guided to confront questions about how the provisions of Title IX ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of gender, and to think about what sex equality means across different contexts.

This unit contains 5 lessons:
Lesson 1: Conceptualizing Equality and Non-Discrimination
Lesson 2: Analyzing Title IX and Athletics
Lesson 3: Applying Title IX Beyond Sports
Lesson 4: Applying Title IX
Lesson 5: Reshaping Title IX

This subject explores the legal history of the United States as a gendered system. It examines how women have shaped the meanings of American citizenship through pursuit of political rights such as suffrage, jury duty, and military service, how those political struggles have varied for across race, religion, and class, as well as how the legal system has shaped gender relations for both women and men through regulation of such issues as marriage, divorce, work, reproduction, and the family. The course readings will draw from primary and secondary materials in American history, as well as some court cases. However, the focus of the class is on the broader relationship between law and society, and no technical legal knowledge is required or assumed.

This course serves as an overview of business practices on a global scale, including a look at cultural, legal, and logistical perspectives.