Spring 2024 Class Schedule: Center for Legal Studies

Spring 2024 Class Schedule

To read course descriptions, click on the course titles below.
Note that courses are subject to change.

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
LEGAL_ST 101-8	First-Year Writing Seminar: Race Terror: Sociolegal Readings of Race Horror Films	Jesse Yeh	MW 9:30-10:50
LEGAL_ST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Race Terror: Sociolegal Readings of Race Horror Films Monsters, boogeymen, zombies, and ghosts. Horror films are often spaces for us as a culture to work through what terrifies us in the real world. In the US, this can rarely be separated from race. From the monstrous racial other to the racial violence inflicted upon Americans of color, this First-Year Writing Seminar explores race in American society through the lens of horror films. In this class, we will read legal and social scientific writings on the construction and maintenance of race and racial subordination; we will analyze how films engage with racial meanings through dialogues, images, and plots; and we will develop our ability to produce evidence-based academic writings.
LEGAL_ST 207-0-20	Legal Studies Research Methods (also SOCIOL 227)	Jesse Yeh	MW 12:30-1:50
LEGAL_ST 207-0-20 Legal Studies Research Methods (also SOCIOL 227) What constitutes evidence? How is it created? What makes it relevant and reliable? The interdisciplinary field of legal studies has a diverse range of answers to these questions. In this class, we will focus on jurisprudence and legal reasoning, qualitative and quantitative social science methods, and historical and textual analysis. Through engaging with these interdisciplinary methods, we will develop your ability to both productively evaluate scholarly research on law and legal processes, as well as conduct your own research on legal institutions.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-21	Surveillance, Policing and the Law	Abigail Barefoot	MW 2:00-3:20
LEGAL_ST 376-0-21 Surveillance, Policing and the Law How are surveillance technologies shaping daily life and society, especially in terms of shaping what we think, see, and do? Building on the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies, this course explores the intersection of policing, surveillance, and the law and raises questions about (in) security, civil liberties, control, and privacy. Topics will include The Patriot Act, biometrics, algorithm and predictive policing, and citizen surveillance. Students will also engage with the political, ethical, and methodological concerns that increased surveillance raises.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-22	Reality TV and Legal Theory (also AMER ST 310-3)	Nicolette Bruner	TTH 9:30-10:50
LEGAL_ST 376-0-22 Reality TV and Legal Theory (also AMER ST 310-3) For the past thirty years, reality television – a genre of programming that aims to give us a view into the “unscripted” actions of our peers – has been a dominant force in U.S. entertainment. Many of us watch these shows to relax, to turn off our critical thinking, and to immerse ourselves wholly into some manufactured drama and schadenfreude. Considered as a cultural text, though, reality television can illuminate some profound truths: about how we decide what is right and wrong, about the tension between written and unwritten rules, and whether anyone can simply be “here to make friends.” In this course, we ask what reality TV can teach us about the nature of law. We’ll read and discuss key works in the philosophy of law from H.L.A. Hart, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Scott Shapiro, and others, and then see how their ideas stand up to the test of shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, FBoy Island, Ink Master, and Bachelor in Paradise. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to explain the main currents of thought in legal philosophy with reference to elimination ceremonies, confessionals, alliances, and other fundamentals of reality TV gameplay.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-23 (also HIST 395)	Holocaust Trials (also HIST 395)	Ben Frommer	TTH 3:30-4:50
LEGAL_ST 376-0-23 (also HIST 395) Holocaust Trials (also HIST 395) After the Second World War the victorious Allied powers and the liberated peoples of Europe engaged in an unprecedented attempt to bring Nazi war criminals and domestic collaborators to justice. Courts throughout the continent tried and punished hundreds of thousands for having worked with and for Germany and the Axis powers. By and large, however, those trials concentrated on crimes of political collaboration and paid little attention to what is now accepted as the Nazis' greatest crime: the genocide of European Jewry. Although courts did punish some architects of the so-called Final Solution, thousands of Europeans who had organized, perpetrated or otherwise contributed to the Holocaust escaped with minimal penalties or no punishment at all. Over the subsequent decades individuals, organizations, and states have sought to redress the failure to seek out and punish those perpetrators at war's end. Lawyers have prosecuted and defended accused war criminals before courts. Historians have documented the development and execution of genocide, while others have sought to deny the very murders themselves. Through the examination of a series of trials, the first half of the course will discuss both the struggle to bring perpetrators to justice and the efforts to obscure the crimes that had been committed. We will consider the prosecution of war crimes and genocide in the context of the development of international law and historical knowledge over the decades from the Second World War to the present day. For the second half of the course students will concentrate on individual research papers based on primary sources (for example, the records of the Nuremberg Tribunal or Eichman Trial).
LEGAL_ST 383-0-20	Gender, Sexuality and the Carceral State (also GNDR ST 351)	Abigail Barefoot	MW 2:00-3:20
LEGAL_ST 383-0-20 Gender, Sexuality and the Carceral State (also GNDR ST 351) This course explores the rise of the carceral state in the United with particular attention to ethnographic, sociolegal, feminist, queer, and transgender theoretical approaches to the study of prisons. The course centers on girls, women, and LGBT people’s experiences with systems of punishment, surveillance, and control. In addition, students will learn how feminist and queer activists have responded to institutions of policing and mass incarceration; investigate how they have understood prison reform, prison abolition, and transformative justice; and consider the political, ethical, and methodological concerns that policing, and mass incarceration raise.
LEGAL_ST 394-LK-20	Lawyering: Education and Practice	Seth Meyer	M 10:00-12:50
LEGAL_ST 394-LK-20 Lawyering: Education and Practice Attorneys are central to American life and popular culture, but the profession is undergoing dramatic change. For years, the supply of lawyers has vastly outstripped the demand for legal jobs and the resulting lawyer bubble has grown. Meanwhile, those who land law jobs have different challenges: recent surveys report many attorneys' growing disenchantment with their work and dissatisfaction with their lives. This seminar will examine the profession's multidimensional crisis. What changes occur in attorneys, both individually and systemically, emerging from law schools and finding their roles in the legal realm? Why is working within the most lucrative big firms now regarded by many as the pinnacle of private practice? What other options are available? It will explore life after law school, examining the disparate places law graduates might find themselves. The course invites prospective law students to consider their potential places, as individual lawyers, in what remains a noble profession. It also invites those students in other undergraduate disciplines who may be curious about trajectories open to them in this post-graduate academic and, ultimately, career field.