[EL] Undergrad election law syllabi

[Michael McDonald]

Thanks to everyone who provided their syllabus to me in preparation for my
new undergraduate election law and voting rights class this fall semester.
After reading through several excellent books this summer, I decided on
assigning Dan Tokaji's *Election Law in a Nutshell* and Rick Hasen's *The
Voting Wars* as the primary books for my class. Both books are great at
what they do. Dan's book is a solid nuts and bolts primer on election law
and Rick's is a more journalistic account. The books tend to complement one
another in that they mostly do not cover the same topics. I've supplemented
these books with some additional readings that I'm happy to share to anyone
interested. I've just given the authors and dates of publication in the
attached syllabus, that some may be able to deduce the titles given a
week's subject material.

I really like both books. To add what I hope is a gentle criticism: Dan
starts with theory, but gets lost in the weeds and does not do a good job
of connecting the cases back to the theory. Rick is the opposite, weaving
lots of non-legal material together, but losing the legal foundations in
his narrative. A book that combines Dan's peanut butter and Rick's
chocolate would be something I would like to consume. Perhaps they would
consider collaborating of such a book since they are co-authors on other
projects.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, University of Florida
352-273-2371
www.electproject.org
@ElectProject

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 9:45 AM, Ben Highton <bhighton at ucdavis.edu> wrote:

> Hi Michael,
> Did you get any helpful responses to this?  I'll also be teaching a course
> like this for the first time, and have started looking for useful guides.
> If you're interested, here is what I've got so far.
> Sincerely,
> Ben
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 7:56 PM, Michael McDonald <
> dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If anyone has recently taught an election law class to upper division
>> undergraduates, I'd appreciate if you could share your syllabus with me. I
>> am teaching a fall class for the first time and would like to see what
>> approaches and materials other people use.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> -Mike
>>
>> ============
>> Dr. Michael P. McDonald
>> Associate Professor, University of Florida
>> 352-273-2371 <(352)%20273-2371>
>> www.electproject.org
>> @ElectProject
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Law-election mailing list
>> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
>> http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
>>
>
>
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