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Short Notes On Teaching About The Micro-Politics Of Class, With Examples From Torts And Employment Law Casebooks, Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: This short Essay explores several potential teaching moments in which one might raise issues concerning the micro-politics of socioeconomic class. I discuss cases found in popular casebooks for three course areas in which I teach: torts, employment, and employment discrimination law. All of these courses raise questions of distributive justice, in the sense that they all deal with issues about how economic and social resources, including legal rights or protections, get allocated between "haves" and "have nots." Tort law, as Guido Calabresi pointed out long ago, is at its center about the politics of distribution; its core questions are …