Document Type

Article

Publication Date

January 2008

First Page

1129

Abstract

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 political ones that address under what circumstances economic resources should be reallocated.

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