Legal History Meets the Honors Program

• Author: Robert B. Bennett, Jr.
• Published date: 01 January 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1722.2009.00065.x
• Date: 01 January 2009

Legal History Meets the Honors

Program

Robert B. Bennett, Jr.

n

I. INTRODUCTION

The Academy of Legal Studies in Business Task Force on General Educa-

tion argued persuasively that: ‘‘No serious measure of a civilization’s

achievements can afford to omit the role of law and the legal environ-

ment. Law studies are inexorably interpolated into the full breadth and

depth of what society must pass on to the coming generations.’’

1

The con-

tributions of culture to the law and the law to culture cannot be overes-

timated. As Oliver Wendell Holmes noted:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt neces-

sities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public

policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with

their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in de-

termining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the

story of a nation’s development through many centuries,and it cannot be dealt

with as if it contained only the axioms andcorollaries of a book of mathematics.

2

However, in my Legal Environment and Business Law courses, my focus

has been necessarily confined to the present realities of law as a framework

for and a constraint on business, with only such cultural and historical

digressions which are necessary to place current realities in context.

It was with the importance of this symbiotic relationship of law and

society in mind that I originally submitted a course proposal to teach in the

Butler University Honors Program. I attempted to develop a course en-

r2009, Copyright the Author

Journal compilation rAcademy of Legal Studies in Business 2009

211

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Volume 26, Issue 1, 211–239, Winter/Spring 2009

n

Professor of Business Law, Butler University.

1

TaskForce on General Education, Legal Studies in General Education: Phase I Final Report,17J.

LEGAL STUD.EDUC. 161, 178 (1999) [hereinafter GenEd Report].

2

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,THE COMMON LAW 5 (1881) (Mark D. Howe ed. 1963).

titled Law and Culture which would look at some landmark periods or

events in legal history and explore how those events were the product of

their culture and how they affected their culture. Among the events or

periods that I have looked at in iterations of the course have been the

Nuremberg trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the modern American litiga-

tion explosion, and the events surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court de-

cision Kelo v. City of New London.

3

This article will discuss the course and

these events and periods, together with resources that instructors might

use in developing a similar course.

II. BACKGROUND

The Honors Program at Butler University intends to attract and retain the

best students in the incoming class. The program seeks to offer a range of

innovative, nontraditional, interdisciplinary courses culminating in students

learning research methodology and leading to the writing of an honors

thesis. The course work, which students take largely in the freshman and

sophomore years, is divided into two credit hour courses of three types:

HN 100 Honors Freshmen Seminars are designed to introduce first semester

freshmen to the honors experience; offered fall semester only.

HN 200 (or 201) Seminars examine a great work, thinker or artist from var-

ious angles: artistic, scientific, historical, philosophical, religious, etc.

HN 300 Colloquia focus on a central theme or question and examine it from a

variety of disciplines and approaches.

4

I developed Law and Culture for an HN300 designation, but the course

could easily be revised to meet the standards for many universities’ general

education requirements.

5

The course has now been through several

different iterations but pertinent parts of a sample syllabus are attached

as Appendix.

3

545 U.S. 469 (2005).

4

Butler Honors Program Application (copy on file with the author).

5

See GenEd Report, supra note 1, at 171–84 (describing the typical framework of general ed-

ucation requirements and how a legal studies course might meet those requirements). See also

Nim Razook, Leviathans, Critical Thinking and Legal Philosophy: A Proposal for a General Education

Legal Studies Course,21J.L

EGAL STUD.EDUC. 1 (2003) (describing the development and outline

of a general studies course).

212 Vol. 26 / The Journal of Legal Studies Education