Informed Citizens. Accountable Power.

Who are “we” the People?

Agenda:

• • Preliminary Matters (25 minutes)

• • • Administrative Matters (9 minutes)
      • Finalizing Course Time and Breaks (3 minutes)
      • Grading Scheme (2 minutes)
      • Website (2 minutes)
      • American Constitution Society Abroad (2 minutes)
    • Introductions (16 minutes)
      • Instructor (1 minute)
      • Course (5 minutes)
      • Reading American Cases: Why caselaw? (5 minutes)
      • Questions (5 minutes)

• • Getting to Know the Subject-Matter ( 20 minutes):

• • • Situating the American Legal System (10 minutes)
    • Nature and Authority of the U.S. Constitution (10 minutes)

• • Getting Started (45 minutes):
    • • Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

Assigned Materials:

Complete:

• Entrance Survey

View:

• Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream (August 28, 1963)
• Fannie Lou Hammer, Congressional Testimony

Read:

• CASE OVERVIEW: Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
• EXCERPT: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)
• Amy, Sturgis, Liberty in Perfection: Freedom in Native American Thought, Foundation for Economic Education (Sept. 1, 1999)

Questions to Consider:

1. What is freedom?
2. What does the American idea of freedom have in common with any European equivalent?
3. What is different about the American understanding of freedom?
4. Where do we source the American understanding of freedom?
5. What are the sources of American culture?
6. What struggles or contests defined the American conception of personhood?
7. How did these struggles cause American tradition to diverge from European and other ancestries?
8. What does the Preamble of the American Constitution set out to achieve?
9. How do African-American and Native American struggles interpret the purpose of this preamble?
10. How does the American tradition move from Dred Scott to Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hammer, and Barack Obama?
11. How does the nation transition from the vision of Barack Obama to the ideologies of Donald Trump?
12. Which vision is “more” defining of America’s history and its “people”?
13. Who are “we” the people?

OPTIONAL Supplementary Materials: 

Reading:

Legal Materials:

• LEGISLATION: Missouri Compromise of 1820

Historical Literature:

• EXCERPT: Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (July 5, 1852)
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
• Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1800s)
• Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and Freedom (1855)
• Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
• Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (1901)

Contemporary Scholarship:

• EXCERPT: Chapter 1: Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (1977)
• Sanford Levinson, Reconsidering the Syllabus in “Constitutional Law”, 17 Yale Law Journal FORUM (May 16, 2008).
• Native America, PBS (2018) [Documentary Series]  (Particularly Episode 2)

Listening:

Speeches:

• Sanford Levinson, Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power Speech” (1966)

Music:

• Native American Healer Songs
• Slave Spirituals:
  • Slave Songbook: Original of the Negro Spiritual
•  Jazz:
  • Live Performance: Billie Holiday “Strange Fruit” Live 1959
  • Live Performance: Duke Ellington
  • Live Performance: John Coltrane
• Soul:
  • Aretha Franklin, Respect (1967)
  • Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come
• Rap:
  • Tupac Shakur, Changes
• Contemporary Music:
  • John Cage, 4’33”

Viewing:

Visual Arts:

• James Agee and Walker Evans, “You Ain’t Never Seen Trouble Till You Lose a Youngun” SLATE (June 12, 2013).
• The photographs of the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
•  Photographers:
  • Gordon Parks
  • Dorothea Lange
  • Helen Levitt
  • Walker Evans
  • Robert Frank
• Painters:
  • Kehinde Wiley
  • Georgia O’Keeffe
• Sculptors:
  • Sarah Sze
  • Kara Walker