Teaching
Syllabus: The Role of the State Attorney General
Harvard Law School
James E. Tierney has been teaching a seminar on the role of the state attorney general since 2000 when it was first offered at Columbia Law School. The current iteration of the course, taught with with former Maine Solicitor General Peter Brann, has been offered at Harvard Law School since 2010. The course is now offered in over twenty law schools.
At Harvard, the course uses an innovative open casebook created on Harvard Law School’s H2O Casebook platform — a web-based platform designed to help law faculty create, share, and remix digital casebooks and other educational materials.
Fall 2024 | Course Intro (excerpt)
The Role of the State Attorney General
The role of state attorneys general has dramatically expanded as these elected officials and their staff have become increasingly important actors in American jurisprudence. They continue to make their mark in consumer protection, antitrust, civil rights, education, immigration, labor law, political corruption and environmental protection even as they tender daily legal advice that impacts the workings of state government. Working alone or in combination with or opposed to the federal government, their colleagues in other states or with businesses, unions and interest groups, the attorneys general are now major players in American jurisprudence.
This two credit course examines the core duties of attorneys general and reviews and critiques their authority and performance. The class will examine the means utilized by attorneys general in carrying out their responsibilities including their ethical responsibilities. It will also discuss the implications for federalism and separation of powers by exploring state relations with state and federal agencies that have parallel jurisdiction. Finally, the course will discuss the impact that interest groups and the media have on the office of attorney general. Attorneys general and their staff regularly visit the class.
“When we talk about the office of the state attorney general, we’re talking about the big cases of our time … Students need to understand what’s going on the state level. Attorney general offices are bringing these cases, and how they bring them, how they think about them, how they staff them, how they conceptualize them … that’s what I teach.”
Clea Simon, “New law school casebook for teaching about state attorneys general,” Harvard Law Today, June 21, 2022.
Teaching About State AGs in Law School
Taking states seriously: new frontiers of public law
Posting by Dan Rodriquez, former Dean of Northwestern Law School
Friday, January 3, 2020
One of the most interesting and revelatory new connections I forged during my post-decanal sabbatical adventure was with Mr. James Tierney. Teaching currently at the Harvard Law School, Jim is the former attorney general of Maine -- and not just any AG, but someone who has been described as "America's 51st attorney general." Passionate, brilliant, and energetic, Jim is an evangelist for curricular attention to state public law. He explains, rightly, that most of our students will become deeply engaged, in one way or another, with state and local legal institutions. These institutions (take the state judiciary as just one obvious example) function in the long shadow of state political institutions. Lawyers permeate these institutions and the work of lawyers on behalf of clients, whether for private pecuniary interest or the public interest broadly defined, is deeply enmeshed into state legal and political structures.
To the end of enriching student learning, both doctrinal and experiential, Jim and a number of other resolute colleagues have developed meaningful courses in this space. State constitutional law, which is experiencing a nice renaissance, and local government law are obvious examples. Less obvious are traditional courses which would benefit from such exposure to the work of, inter alia, the state executive branch and also the network of relationships among state agencies, state courts, and general purpose local governments. Students could (and perhaps should) be exposed to these issues in the first year private law core, including torts, contracts, and property.
Tierney, who has walked this walk at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools, among others, has also developed a web of resources for current state AGs. The stateag.org site … gives one a flavor of a rich bevy of programs and initiatives that assist state lawyer-leaders and also communicate, and not too subtly, the message that understanding the mechanisms of state government is increasingly important.
At the level of tactics, we ought to look for ways of connecting these professional opportunities with law school curricula, and even academic scholarship. There is, of course, imaginative and sophisticated work in local government law, some of which connects to state public law themes rather directly. And state con law, as mentioned above, is an active scholarly field with good growth potential. What Tierney's initiatives, propelled (as I can testify first-hand) by a remarkable lawyer with boundless energy, point to is a marriage between ambitious public law academics and their law school homes on one side of the aisle and seasoned AGs and other public officials who are committed to working within the domain of academic culture to fertilize this field of state public law.
Posted by Dan Rodriguez on January 3, 2020 at 12:32 PM at ProfsBlawg: Daniel Rodriguez
Federalist Society National Student Symposium
Federalism and the Separation of Powers
Panel I: Federalism and the Separation of Powers
2024 National Student Symposium
The Federalist Society
April 1, 2024
Center on Civil Justice, NYU School of Law
Nationwide Injunctions
Nationwide Injunctions As Such
Nationwide Injunctions (Panel 1)
Center on Civil Justice, NYU School of Law
October 23, 2023
Center on Civil Justice, NYU School of Law
MDL at 50
Panel on The State Role and State Attorneys-General
In October, 2018, the Center on Civil Justice hosted MDL at 50, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Multidistrict Litigation Statute. The conference included a panel on “The State Role and State Attorneys-General” with a talk by the Director of the Harvard Law School Attorney General Clinic, James Tierney, who also served as the Attorney General of Maine on the value of teaching about AG's in law school.
Moderator:
• Abbe Gluck, Professor, Yale Law School
Panelists:
• Natalie Ludaway, Chief Deputy Attorney General, Washington, DC Attorney General
• David Nachman, Senior Enforcement Counsel, New York Attorney General's Office
• Luther Strange, former Senator, United States Senate; former Attorney General, Alabama
• James Tierney, Lecturer at Law, Harvard Law School; former Attorney General, Maine
The conference was co-hosted by the Center on Civil Justice at NYU Law School and the Liman and Solomon Centers at Yale Law School.