Spring 2026
Professor(s):
Emily Berman (FACULTY)
Credits: 3
Course Areas: Procedure and Practice
Time: 1:00p-2:30p TTH Location:
Course Outline: This course cover procedural issues such as how litigants can get their cases into federal court, questions regarding the relationship between state and federal courts, and at a general survey level, some of the substantive claims and defenses that parties most commonly raise in federal court. Topics to be covered include congressional control over the jurisdiction of the federal courts; federal question jurisdiction; justiciability doctrines such as standing, ripeness, mootness, and the political question doctrine; enforcement of federal rights against state and federal officials; federal common law; the 11th Amendment and sovereign immunity; official immunities; abstention doctrines; and United States Supreme Court review of state court judgments.
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.
Quota=40.
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule:
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No
Experiential Course Type: No
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Available
Course Materials
Book(s) Required
Course Materials: The casebook is Low and Jeffries’ Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations (Bradley et al. eds, 10th ed. 2022), ISBN: 978-1-68561-085-2.
A note on electronic case books: Be aware that the exam is open book, but it will use Electronic Bluebook in a mode that precludes access to all other material on your computer. If you want to be able to access your casebook, therefore, you must acquire a hard copy or print out the portions you would like to have with you for the exam.
. Some reading is in the 2025 Supplement, which is publicly available and posted on Canvas.
. Any assignments that are not found in the casebook will be posted on Canvas in the Handouts folder or directly linked in the specific assignments for each class.