POS 2041 American Politics

Despite the great diversity of ideas about political life held among the American citizenry, there is one thesis upon which most people agree: politics is messy.  Without denying the complexity of political life in America, this course attempts to make sense of the animating features of our polity and the principles that guide its activity. This course offers students an introduction to the modes and orders of government in the United States.  Among the topics to be covered in this class will be the institutions by which we are governed and the philosophical principles upon which our government was founded.  In particular this course will focus on the organization and activities of the three branches of the national government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Finally, our course will conclude with an examination of American political culture.

POS 3608 Federalism and  Separation of Powers

This course offers and introduction to American Constitutional Law as it has developed in relation to the major institutions of American government: the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government and the powers reserved to the states.  Our purpose here is to understand the Court’s decisions as it affects other institutions of American government.  We seek here not only to understand the internal logic of each case, but the relevance of the Court’s decisions as a coequal branch of the national government.  In particular, students will examine through a case-study approach the evolution of judicial review, separation of powers, powers of the president and congress, the evolution of federalism, the national commerce power, and national taxing and spending powers.  

POS 3624 Constitutional Law: Individual Rights and Privileges

This course forms the second part of the UWF Government Department’s study of the foundations of constitutional law in the United States. In this course, students explore the constitutional adjudication of cases involving freedom of speech and press, religious liberty, criminal procedural protections, equal protection, voting rights, and right to privacy. Unlike the first course in this sequence that examines cases involving the separation of powers, this course will primarily focus on constitutional controversies involving individual rights. Students will be expected to understand and analyze a limited number of cases over a series of three exams. Completion of the first constitutional law course in this series is not required.

POS 3990 Law and Politics in Literature

This course offers an introduction to the function of law in political life by examining prominent works of literature. By examining a selection of texts over various periods of the Western tradition, students will gain a deeper insight into the human motives that animate the creation of law and the problems among human beings that law attempts to redress. During the semester, we will study the literary thinker’s understanding of law through multiple genres that constitute the Western canon of literature.

POS 4673 Jurisprudence

This course offers an introduction to the very broad subject of Jurisprudence.  According to its Latin root, the term simply means knowledge of right, but in legal studies Jurisprudence has come to refer to the study of how law is interpreted by those with the obligation of applying it in particular cases and also how a community perceives the nature of its obligations in relation to law.  Students of jurisprudence seek to analyze, explain, classify, and criticize entire bodies of law.  In this course, we will divide our treatment of the subject into two parts.  First, we will examine Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and the grounds upon which he attempted to distinguish just from unjust laws.  To deepen our understanding and assessment of his argument, we will follow the train of intellectual authorities King cites in defense of his argument.  In the second half of the course, we will examine the contemporary debate over the nature of law and the appropriate considerations for judicial interpretation. 

POS 4990 Law and Politics in the Hebrew Bible

This course offers an introduction to the study of political philosophy in the Hebrew Bible.  In this course, we will trace the development of the Israelite polity from Genesis to Kings I and II.  The course is designed to illustrate the Hebrew Bible’s dual theme regarding political life: on the one hand, the Hebrew Bible seems deeply skeptical about politics, and yet it also recognizes the inevitable dependence of human beings on political associations.  Here, we will seek to understand how the Hebrew people struggled to accommodate the tension between these two themes in their choice of political organizations and in their efforts to sustain their religious faith. 

POT 4204 American Political Thought

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. — Federalist #1

This course will be conducted as a seminar on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s work is generally regarded as the foremost treatment of the underlying philosophical foundations of the American political regime. In this course, our particular concern is to examine the features of American politics that make government by reflection and choice most difficult. Particularly interesting to us are two principles that seem at odds in the American political tradition: liberalism and democracy. According to the political theorists of liberalism, governments are established among human beings with the limited purpose of protecting rights. The Declaration of Independence acknowledges this feature of liberalism when it explains that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However, the Declaration also explains that governments derive their just powers from the “consent of the governed.” The problem throughout American political thought has been the tension between the consent of the people and the obligation of government to protect rights.

POT 4601 Masters of Political Thought

The essence of political theory is the study of regimes. By regime is meant the system of government and its relations to the rest of society, those institutions where people live, learn, work, worship, and play. This involves inquiring into what is and has been as well as what could be, i.e., the real, the ideal, and the possible. This course examines what a few of the greatest political thinkers have written about these things. The objectives of the course are that you learn the basic ideas espoused by these thinkers, comparing and contrasting them, and that you use their ideas as a foil against which to formulate and express your own thoughts about how politics is and how it could or could not be. There will be no exams, as such. Grading will be based on three essays- two mid-term essays and one final one- summarizing and commenting on the material. More will be expected of graduate students in terms of quantity and quality of work.