Introduction to US Law: The Code and the Exception
Modeled on the three-year law school curriculum. 1L builds the foundations every lawyer learns first: rule of law, precedent, the Constitution, contracts, property, and torts. 2L applies those tools to criminal justice, civil procedure, administrative agencies, corporate power, immigration, and environmental regulation. 3L confronts the hardest questions: race and structural inequality, competing theories of interpretation, technology's challenge to legal categories, international law without a sovereign — and Luhmann's radical claim that law is an autopoietic system that reproduces itself through the binary code legal/illegal.
NOT a Pre-Law Survey
This course does not list legal topics — it teaches you to think like a lawyer, then shows you why that is both powerful and dangerous. Every unit opens with a real case, a real decision, and real consequences. The 1L/2L/3L structure mirrors actual legal education, but the question running through every unit is: whose interests does law serve?
What You Will Learn
1L: How Lawyers Think
From Marbury v. Madison to Palsgraf, build the doctrinal foundations. Rule of law, stare decisis, the case method — then contracts, property, and torts as the three pillars of private law.
Unit 1
2L: The Domains
Criminal law, civil procedure, constitutional rights, the administrative state, corporate power, immigration, and environmental regulation — each as a separate application of 1L concepts.
Unit 7
3L: Law as a System
Same text, same method, opposite results. Critical Race Theory, textualism vs. living constitution, code as law, law without a sovereign — and Luhmann's autopoietic legal system as the bridge back to sociology.
Unit 18