Meredith Fensom
Jon Mills
Center for Government Responsibility, Levin College of Law
Interdisciplinary Law & Policy in the Americas Seminar
The Law & Policy in the Americas Seminar, Law 6930, will offer credit to both law students and graduate students from the Center for Latin American Studies. The seminar will evaluate the development of legal systems in the Americas and will include a comparative analysis. Topics include constitutional comparisons, trade and commercial development, alternative dispute resolution mechanism use and development, citizen security and human rights, property rights, and a review of regional judicial reform efforts focusing on efforts to improve access, efficiency and transparency in justice systems as a means to promote accountability and combat corruption.
The Internationalizing the Curriculum Grant Award enables the extension of planned travel in the region and will support field and library based research. Interviews with public policy makers and actors in regional judicial reform programs will be conducted with the objective of gaining course case studies; the library based research will identify course readings. Summer research in the region focused on analyzing the economic impact of judicial reform and the market effects of a deficient judiciary and composition of the first legal component to the annual Latin American Business Environment Report will be incorporated into the new seminar.