Recent Capstone Projects
Two JD/LLM students, supervised by Professor Katharine Bartlett, studied gender clauses in constitutions of countries around the world and explored the historical development and trends of such clauses. The students created a database of gender clauses to be used as a public research tool and drafted a paper drawing conclusions from that database concerning the ways in which constitutions define gender-based rights.
A JD/MA student, supervised by Professors Jedediah Purdy and Fred Moton of Duke's English Department, examined issues of race and property from the dual perspectives of American history and American literature. The student completed an independent study with Professor Moton of a variety of literary texts on race and property and prepared an annotated bibliography, and simultaneously explored these issues with Professor Purdy through a guided set of readings in legal history and philosophy. The final paper reconciled the contributions of both law and literature to the study of these issues, focusing particularly on abolition.
A JD/LLM/MPP student worked with Professors Ralf Michaels and Philip Cook of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy to study the role of comparative methodology in the discipline of international development law and the role of statistical models in assessing the efficacy of legal development programs. The student's final project developed and used a statistical methodology to evaluate the efficacy of six legal development programs initiated by the Peru-based non-governmental organization Instituto Libertad y Democracia.
A JD student worked with Professor James Coleman in evaluating and recommending various mechanisms for improving procedures used by the North Carolina Office of Administrative Hearings, including evaluation of the office's docketing and case assignment system, revising procedural mechanisms to ensure due process for litigants, hiring court reporters, and developing a proposal for an Administrative Law Clinic/pro bono project.
A JD student worked with Professor Jerome Reichman to evaluate the progress of scientific innovation for certain technologies and compared that progress to a legal scheme involving liability rules as an alternative to patents to determine whether patent law has helped or hindered technological advances, or could do so in the future. The project was funded by a research grant awarded to Duke by the Centers for Excellence in ELSI (the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Research Program).
