Spring 2026
Professor(s):
Andrew Lanham (FACULTY)
Credits: 3
Course Areas: Practice Skills - (Research and Writing)
Law And Society/ Interdisciplinary
Time: 10:30a-12:00p TTH Location:
Course Outline: “The Civil Rights Movement in U.S. Legal History,” will examine civil rights law and activism across the twentieth century. It will provide students with the opportunity to learn about the history of, among other things: Supreme Court litigation, such as Brown v. Board of Education; civil rights legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and grassroots civil rights activism, such as the founding of the NAACP in the early 1900s. We will read a variety of primary and secondary sources, including Supreme Court opinions, book chapters and law review articles by historians, and primary sources such as historical newspapers and archived documents from civil rights movement organizations.
This course fulfills the UHLC writing requirement, with students writing academic legal papers on a topic related to the seminar and at least 10,000 words (including footnotes). The seminar will also include practical training in the methods used for legal history research. Students will develop paper topics in consultation with the professor, and students may write about either civil rights history, or about contemporary issues in civil rights law (with attention to the deeper historical context for those contemporary legal questions).
Course Syllabus: Syllabus
Course Notes: (Face-to-Face) The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule:
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: Yes
Experiential Course Type: No
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Instructor Preference)
Course Materials
No book required for this course
Professor Lanham will Provide the materials via Canvas, via a new course-delivery system called Leganto.
