By Ann W. Parks

Students attend the first class of "The Law of '24'" at Georgetown Law.

The nation’s television writers may still be on strike, but Georgetown Law’s new class, “The Law of ‘24,’” premiered on Tuesday night, January 15, as scheduled.

The class — the brainchild of Adjunct Professor W. Gary Sharp — will examine U.S. domestic and international legal issues surrounding counterterrorism, using hypothetical situations drawn from the Fox television show. The series, which was slated to begin its seventh season this month, follows a U.S. counterterrorism agent named Jack Bauer who takes on the bad guys without necessarily considering the legal implications of his actions.

Though the course is linked to the popular TV show, that doesn’t mean that students are required to watch seasons one through six on DVD, or that they sit around the classroom discussing highlights of their favorite episodes. The 18 students who arrived for the first class ranged from “obsessive” watchers of the show to those who have never seen it at all.

They arrived ready to work, with a chapter in a textbook on counterterrorism law to discuss and number of important points to consider. What is the proper balance, for example, between national security and civil liberties? Is counterterrorism a law enforcement function or is it war? If the United States is at war with terrorists, what law applies with respect to the use of force?

“If the class was just a discussion of the show, I probably wouldn’t have been interested,” says Peter Mancuso (L’08), a 3L in the class. “But because it does seem to use the show as a constant hypothetical that we can continuously refer to, it does seem to be more interesting.”

That was the goal of Professor Sharp, a Department of Defense lawyer who first got the idea of the class when he was watching the show one night.

“It is extraordinarily difficult to watch ‘24’ without being peppered, if not bombarded, with legal issues that the U.S. government is facing every day … and I thought, what a great way to try to structure a course and to talk to people about the issues,” Sharp explained in a November interview. “This is a nice entertaining way to have a very serious conversation.”

The show, as Sharp pointed out to the class, provides something of a public service in getting people to think about principles such as utilitarianism — the theory that moral, social or political action should achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How does this principle apply, Sharp asked, to a government-authorized shooting of a hijacked commercial airliner, hurtling towards a major city on September 11?

“Think about the decision from the perspective of the person who has to make the decision, and from the [perspective of the] legal adviser,” he urged the class. “The person with the responsibility of ensuring that another aircraft doesn’t hit.”

‘Interesting lens’

The class has attracted attention from the media and from bloggers; several of the students, in fact, first heard about it through friends or family members who urged them to check it out.

“At first it was a bit of a struggle to convince them it was an actual class,” says Mancuso, who heard about the course from his brother, a first-year law student at another school (his brother, in turn, heard about it from a blog). “The syllabus was what convinced them — and the 25-page paper requirement.”  

Both J.D. and LL.M. students — some of whom work in government jobs — are enrolled in the course. Matthew Fischer (L’08), for one, says it’s an interesting lens through which to study U.S. and foreign anti-terrorism law.

“The interesting part of the class to me is that it presents an intersection of philosophy, law, and popular storytelling,” he says. “‘24’ and other similar shows are the product of individual views and beliefs, yet they have the capability to shape our collective perceptions. To the extent that they do so, our collective philosophy can be changed …. There’s an opportunity to not only study the laws dealing with terrorism and its prevention, but also how [those laws] can be affected, or not, by our changing perceptions and philosophy.”

January 17, 2008 (AWP)