Welcome to the course! Consider this page to be a “pre-syllabus”—a very preliminary guide to the course, with the information that you need to have right now (including information about how to get much more information).
The full syllabus is available on the web site for the course, at
(You can get to this site by typing in ‘www.ku.edu/~utile’ and then using the links to get to the above site.) I strongly encourage you to visit this site at your earliest convenience, to familiarize yourself with its contents, and also to bookmark it and to check it regularly. I tend to make small changes to my courses’ syllabi (reading assignments, etc.) as courses progress, so you should check the syllabus online rather than printing a hard copy and relying on it throughout the semester. Also, as the course progresses, I’ll be posting other course documents, such as class notes and writing assignments, on this site.
Along with visiting the course web site, the other thing you should do right away is to buy the book for the course. It is
You can buy it on campus (I ordered it as a textbook), or elsewhere. Be sure to get it right away, since you’ll need to read some of it before our second class.
We’ll also have a lot of supplementary reading, including chapters from two important books in philosophy of law:
You may want to buy these books instead of having to photocopy several chapters out of them. New copies of the The Concept of Law, of which you’ll have to read about 45 pages, retail for around $30; and those of Law’s Empire, of which you’ll have to read about 164 pages, retail for about $25. Although the Altman book is the only one I asked the KU bookstore to buy, I would strongly suggest also buying your own copy of at least the Dworkin book.