Course Description
This seminar will introduce students to the federal, selected state, and international laws and policies now available to combat human trafficking and modern-day forms of slavery. The course will begin with a brief examination of abolitionism. It will then review the adoption of U.S. anti-slavery and peonage laws, showing how those laws proved. insufficient to curb modern slavery and trafficking, such failure forming the backdrop for the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000. The seminar will then conduct an in-depth analysis of federal laws prohibiting sex and labor trafficking crimes and consider how such laws are used to investigate and prosecute those offenses. A brief investigation of selected state laws as well as the problem of migrant smuggling will also be conducted. The last part of the seminar will examine the international anti-trafficking legal framework established under the U.N. Palermo Protocol and consider whether global efforts to implement the Protocol have had any success.
The methodology employed in the seminar will examine each topic using the lenses of legal history, analytical jurisprudence, and criminal law theory. The focus will be on the criminal law provisions of the TVPA as it is logistically impossible to cover the foreign policy, immigration, and social service aspects of that law in a course like this and our concern will be the implications of the TVPA for criminal theory and practice. After tracing the evolution of the legal definition(s) and social, religious, and economic conceptions of slavery and the rise of anti-slavery thought, we will explore the advent of legislative and prosecutorial recognition of the alleged new crime of “human trafficking” and examine how TVPA has been interpreted and applied by the courts in cases involving allegations of human trafficking and slavery. By the end of the course, students should come away with a good understanding of the major legal, jurisprudential, public policy, and practical law enforcement issues involved in the struggle against modern-day slavery and human trafficking. This will include a close examination of the role of the internet in sex and labor trafficking. The reading in the course will be supplied by the professor and will be substantial. The reading will be supplemented with lectures, video presentations, and talks by one or more guest speakers.
Course Type
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SeminarCourse Credits
2.0Course Degree
Juris Doctor