What is happening right now in the USA? During its spring term of 2022, the Supreme Court is going to decide cases on abortion, gun control, religious rights and race. The country holds its breath waiting what will be the way the Court, whose conservative justices have a 6-to-3 majority, will deal with these burning issues of policy. All of these are also fundamental problems of principle, touching nothing less but the American understanding of the groundwork of human existence. Much of this groundwork seems to be explained by the American notion of rights. The Bill of Rights, “the nation’s moral sail” as they say, is a constant object of interpretations and contestations going on not only among lawyers but in the wider public as well.
Our American expedition will be about discovery of two things at one go. Firstly, we will find out how to retrieve the cases of the U.S. Supreme Court from electronic databases, how collect a definite set of research materials, and how to trace the changes and continuities in a historical line of cases. Secondly, we will explore the American methods of rights-based and principle-oriented case argumentation and try to consider this in the broader context of American social structure and political culture. Our expedition to the New World is also about discovery of the sources of what has during the last couple of decades stranded forcefully in the Finnish legal culture as well. Namely, the critical juridical techniques of human and basic rights argumentation.
- Teacher: Samuli Hurri