American Legal History

FINAL EXAMINATION FALL 2021

Instructions
1. PLEASE DO NOT WRITE YOUR NAME ON THE EXAM. WRITE ONLY YOUR EXAM
NUMBER.
2. Upload your response to E-Campus no later than 5pm December 17, 2021.
3. The total word limit for the exam is 3,000 words.
4. You may use any materials covered in class to answer these questions. You may not
consult with anyone else in answering these questions. If you'd like to refer to
contemporary events or general knowledge you may, of course.
5. You may not contact me for any reason during the final exam period.

EXAM STARTS HERE

Please answer both
questions

Question 1: 50%
As we discussed, modern law schools have largely followed the Harvard model developed after
the Civil War, with its emphasis on “legal science.” Much has changed since then with the
broader inclusion of skills-based approaches and policy materials in standard law teaching. There
has nevertheless been much discussion about the continued viability of the modified Harvard
model, with some defending the need for a mixture of theory and practice, with others arguing
for a return to a more apprentice-based model. Read Antonette Barilla’s short essay “Honoring
Our History: The Bench and the Bar as Legal Educators and the Resurrection of Legal
Apprenticeships.”1 Discuss the merits of Barilla’s proposal with reference to the historical
development of law and legal practice in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Question 2: 50%
In The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019),
Eric Foner writes: “[T]he Reconstruction amendments greatly enhanced the power of the federal
government, transferring much of the authority to define citizens’ rights from the states to the
nation. They forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the
national state and were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy, in which people
only a few years removed from slavery exercised significant political power.” (pp. xix-xx). With
reference to a few historical examples, discuss how the Civil War Amendments represent a
“second founding” for American constitutional law and political culture.

1
https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=jel