Immersion in a Dynamic Legal Culture: Introducing Students in Panamá to the Law, Systems, and Legal Culture of the United States; Part 7 Judicial Review and Constitutional Interpretation

I was delighted to have the opportunity to teach in the Penn State Law-Universidad Latina de Panamá Program on the Legal English in the U.S. Legal System. The program gave me an opportunity to road test portions of my just finished book, Introduction to the Law and Legal System of the United States: Structures, Functions, Principles, and Practices in National and International Context (Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming 2019) (for writing about the development of this book in its prior versions, see IntrotoUSLawBook).  For those interested in reviewing the page proofs of the Introduction to the Law and Legal System of the United States, please email me for a copy.

It also permitted me the opportunity to teach the introduction to the U.S. legal system both the well trained non-U.S. lawyers and to do it in Spanish over a short but intense course. I am grateful to both institutions, and their respective leaderships, for helping to make this possible. A big shout out to my teaching assistants, Isa Ferrera Baca and Brandon Ruggiero, both of Penn State University, for their excellent work in putting together the materials, and especially for their organization of the program exercises and the English-Spanish vocabulary.

This post includes the PowerPoints for our seventh and last session--which introduced students to the controversies around the issues of judicial review and constitutional interpretation. In particular, the students considered the function of the courts in the context of constitutional interpretation and the way in which the Common Law "method" was transformed into an instrument of politics through the application of the ideologies of interpretation "of" and "from" text. 

Part 1 (Introduction) may be accessed here.
Part 2 (Common Law) may be accessed here.
Part 3 (Equity) may be accessed here.
Part 4 (Statutes) may be accessed here.
Part 5 (Administrative Regulations) may be accessed here.
Part 6 (Ideologies and Practice of Statutory Interpretation) may be accessed here.
Part 7 (Judicial Review and Constitutional Interpretation) may be accessed here.