Global Arc

The Affordable Care Act, enacted by President Obama in 2010, is an unprecedented federal-state initiative, with provisions to expand health insurance coverage, control health care costs, and improve the health care delivery system. This course will focus on the history of health reform, as well as the implementation challenges since its enactment. We will examine the federal regulatory process, the role that states are playing in implementation, legal challenges to the statute, and Congressional oversight.

This course will explore the relationship between social movements and legal/policy reforms and critically assess the scope and limits of the 1960s-era civil rights laws through an examination of the following legal and policy issues that Black Lives Matter activists have pushed to the center stage of local and national policy debates: policing; mass incarceration; the role of prosecutors; protests and surveillance; labor, work, and wealth; education reform and school discipline; health care reform and access; housing and environmental conditions; and voting rights.

This course is designed to describe the policies defining the provision of educational services with special attention to the context of the US and Latin America. The focus will be on policies that have implications for understanding inequality in education and income through the lens of economic theory of human capital. The course topics will include governance, accountability, choice, finance, and personnel policies for K-12 education, with a focus on the role of teachers; it will also briefly cover issues related to early childhood education and higher education. Class sessions are a mixture of lectures and student-led discussions.

Open only to students enrolled in the school. See 'Program Information' for description. Juniors who are concentrators in the school must register for the policy task force as "Junior Independent Work.'' Seniors should register for SPI 401 or 402 as a course rather than junior independent work.

Open only to students enrolled in the school. See 'Program Information' for description. Juniors who are concentrators in the school must register for the policy task force as "Junior Independent Work.'' Seniors should register for SPI 401 or 402 as a course rather than junior independent work.

The junior policy research seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in policy research and writing. Students may choose from a range of topics.

The junior policy research seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in policy research and writing. Students may choose from a range of topics.

People have plowed up, cut-down and otherwise heavily manipulated more than 75% of the world's land, and the degree and extent of this manipulation continues to expand to meet rising demands for food and wood products. This course will explore the consequences for biodiversity and climate change, the drivers of change and scenarios for the future. Students will think through the complex issues behind conservation planning for biodiversity and gain understanding of what is known and not known about the global carbon cycle. Major class papers and a final presentation by each student will explore solutions.

Course introduces use of economics in understanding both the sources of and the remedies to environmental and resource allocation problems. It emphasizes the reoccurrence of economic phenomenon like public goods, externalities, market failure and imperfect information. Students learn about the design and evaluation of environmental policy instruments, the political economy of environmental policy, and the valuation of environmental and natural resource services. These concepts are illustrated in a variety of applications from domestic pollution of air, water and land to international issues such as global warming and sustainable development.

This course will introduce students to the variety of forms of constitutional government and the way that human rights are understood and enforced by courts around the world. We will trace the emergence of a global constitutional culture and focus more directly on the constitutions of South Africa, India, Germany, France, Hungary, Israel and Canada. We will give primary emphasis to the rights provisions in national constitutions, but will also take transnational constitutional regimes through examining decisions of the European Courts of Human Rights. Two ninety-minute seminars.