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This course is a call to reclaim the deliberative process as a means of generating social change. We invite you to explore the concept of jury in both theory and practice. You will learn about jury in political theory and history. You will engage as co-learners in small-group deliberations, real and virtual, synchronous and asynchronous, as you choose. You will gain hands-on live jury experience of persuading and being persuaded. You will learn about your self and your jury in relation to others. you will be stimulated to explore who you are. We begin by deliberating several historical legal cases. These are warm-up for deliberating major issues we the people face in our time.

Course Format and Teaching Staff

The course is taught by Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School together with a team of teaching fellows who are his students at Harvard Law School and for whom leading the dialogic process in this course is part of their training.

Teaching Fellows:

Francesca Cohen
Michael Athy
Eizabeth Moroney
Rebecca Nesson

The course consists of a series of modules. At the beginning of each module you will have an asynchronous, fully online experience in which you will engage with contextual materials such as videos, animations, written case studies, readings and more. Then you will participate in a group deliberation on the issue of the module with a small group of students and a teaching fellow. Most groups will meet synchronously online using web conferencing, audio chat, or text chat. Those who cannot make any of the synchronous groupings may participate in an asynchronous deliberation group. Following the group deliberation, your group will be polled for your verdict and you will learn the results and see a responsive video from some form of Professor Nesson or a teaching fellow framing and reflecting on the group results. You will also complete a personal reflection on the deliberative process. The issues in the modules are highly engaging and we expect that discussions will continue beyond the end of the modules.

Module 0: Introductions Feb 10–Feb 17	Module 1: Palsgraf Feb 17–Feb 24	Module 2: Hebert Feb 24–Mar 4	Module 3: Snowden Mar 5–Mar 22
	The Elephant in the Room Mar 23–Mar 30
Module 4: Big Sport Mar 31–Apr 9	Module 5: Legalization Apr 10–Apr 20	Module 6: I Can't Breathe Apr 21–May 4	Module 7: Title IX May 5–May 19

Final Projects
Choose your own deliberation
Mar 24-May 19

Course Requirements

This course is about group deliberation not information transfer. We seek to evaluate you on the basis of the engagement and collaborativeness of your participation in the deliberations. You will also complete a final project in which you design your own module with stimulus materials, organize a group deliberation that you will moderate, and prepare a reflection on the results of that group deliberation. The weighting of your work will be as follows:

8% for your participation in each of the eight course modules
36% for your final project

The teaching staff reserves the ability to adjust the percentages upward for either participation or the final project if either is exceptionally good.