Winter 2024 Class Schedule: Center for Legal Studies

Winter 2024 Class Schedule

To read course descriptions, click on the course titles below.
To look up class meeting days and times please go to CAESAR.
Note that courses are subject to change.

Course	Title	Instructor
LEGAL_ST 101-8-1	First-Year Writing Seminar: Environmental Writing: Regulation and Imagination	Nicolette Bruner
LEGAL_ST 101-8-1 First-Year Writing Seminar: Environmental Writing: Regulation and Imagination What is the environment? Is it a collection of resources? An entity in need of protection? An autonomous state of being? In this course, we interrogate the relationship between how we talk about the environment and what we do to – and with – the natural world. Readings will engage with contemporary U.S. problems in environmental law and the environmental humanities, including climate change, riparian rights, environmental impact assessment, and the rights of nature movement. Along the way, we will interrogate how legal language imagines, constructs, and limits the objects it regulates, and practice making productive, evidence-centered interpretative arguments.
LEGAL_ST 101-8-2	First-Year Writing Seminar: Undocumented Americans	Jesse Yeh
LEGAL_ST 101-8-2 First-Year Writing Seminar: Undocumented Americans How does migrant legal status shape the lives of the 11 million Americans who are undocumented? In this first-year seminar, we will read and discuss social scientific writings, court opinions, journalistic accounts, creative nonfictions, podcasts, and more. We will focus on the histories of U.S. migration and immigration policies, how immigration statuses intersect with other social differences, and how immigration statuses shape people’s experiences with key social institutions, such as family, education, healthcare, work, and political participation.
LEGAL_ST 206-0-20	Law and Society (also SOCIOL 206)	Joanna Grisinger
LEGAL_ST 206-0-20 Law and Society (also SOCIOL 206) Law is everywhere. Law permits, prohibits, enables, legitimates, protects, and prosecutes citizens. Law shapes our daily lives in countless ways. This course examines the connections and relationships of law and society using an interdisciplinary social science approach. As one of the founders of the Law and Society movement observed, "Law is too important to leave to lawyers." Accordingly, this course will borrow from several theoretical, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives (including sociology, history, anthropology, political science, and psychology) in order to explore the sociology of law and law's role. This course introduces the relationship between social, cultural, political, and economic forces on the one hand, and legal rules, practices, and outcomes, on the other. We focus on several important questions about law including: How do culture, structure, and conflict explain the relationship between law and society? Why do people obey the law? Why do people go to court? How does the legal system work? What is the role of lawyers, judges, and juries? How does law on the books differ from law in action? How do social problems become legal ones? How can law create or constrain social change?
LEGAL_ST 305-0-1	American Immigration (also HISTORY 305)	Shana Bernstein
LEGAL_ST 305-0-1 American Immigration (also HISTORY 305) This course introduces students to the social, political, legal, and cultural history of immigration in the United States. In addition to exploring the history of southern and eastern European immigrants, it uses a comparative framework to integrate Latin American and Asian migrants into our understanding of immigration since the late nineteenth century. The course is an exploration of major themes in immigration history rather than a comprehensive examination. Issues students will consider include immigration law, acculturation, community, racial formation, victimization vs. agency, the transnational and international context of immigration, and competing notions of citizenship, among others.
LEGAL_ST 315-0	Corporation in US Law and Culture	Nicolette Bruner
LEGAL_ST 315-0 Corporation in US Law and Culture A corporation is its own person under the law, separate from those whom it employs or who may own its stock. How did this happen, and what does it mean for the humans who live and work alongside corporations every day? In this course, we will trace the evolution of the corporate person in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Our focus will be twofold: the evolving legal rights and responsibilities of the corporation, and the role that the corporate person has played in the American cultural imagination.
LEGAL_ST 333-0	Constitutional Law II (also POLI_SCI 333)	Joanna Grisinger
LEGAL_ST 333-0 Constitutional Law II (also POLI_SCI 333) Consideration of US Supreme Court decisions dealing with civil and political rights, including equality, freedom of speech and religion, and criminal procedures.
LEGAL_ST 348-0	Race, Politics, and the Law (also SOCIOL 348-0-20)	Jesse Yeh
LEGAL_ST 348-0 Race, Politics, and the Law (also SOCIOL 348-0-20) This course examines conceptualizations race and racism across the social sciences to situate the role of race in contemporary U.S. politics, policymaking and law. The course considers how race continues to structure life experiences, social outcomes, opinions and political affiliations. Using contemporary political and legal issues, the course addresses how the law deals with racial inequality. Pre-requisite - LS/Soc 206
LEGAL_ST 350-0	Psychology and the Law (taught with PSYCH 340)	Sara Broaders
LEGAL_ST 350-0 Psychology and the Law (taught with PSYCH 340) This course will examine the complex issues involved in applying the science of psychology to the field of law. Among the topics we will cover: • How psychological research can apply to policies and practices in the legal system • Expert testimony • Methods, uses, and limitations of forensic assessment • Determination of legal competence • The insanity defense • Syndromes (Battered Women's Syndrome/Rape Trauma Syndrome) in the legal arena • Criminal profiling types, methods, and limitations • Eyewitness testimony and other memory issues • Interrogation and confessions • Jury selection and decision making • Prisons and death penalty Taught with PSYCH 340; Pre-requisite - PSYCH 110
LEGAL_ST 376-0-21	Moral Panics	Abigail Barefoot
LEGAL_ST 376-0-21 Moral Panics Description coming soon.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-22	Ocean Law and Policy (also ENVR_POL 390-0-21)	Wil Burns
LEGAL_ST 376-0-22 Ocean Law and Policy (also ENVR_POL 390-0-21) The world's oceans, encompassing 70% of the world's area and 90% of its volume, are essential to life on Earth. However, they are increasingly imperiled by an array of anthropogenic stressors, including pollution, overexploitation of natural and non-living resources, and climate change. This class will focus on both the threats posed to ocean ecosystems, including impacts on marine living resources. The focus of the course will be on the role of international law, including treaties and customary international law, in addressing threats to the world's oceans. A large portion of the course will focus on the provisions of the so-called "constitution for the oceans," the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-23	Climate Change Law & Policy (also ENVR_POL 390-0-22)	Wil Burns
LEGAL_ST 376-0-23 Climate Change Law & Policy (also ENVR_POL 390-0-22) This course examines the potential role of the law in confronting climate change from an institutional and policy perspective, examining the role of treaties, national legislation (in the United States), sub-national responses and judicial and quasi-judicial fora. Among the topics that will be addressed include the science associated with climate change, the role of key international climate treaty regimes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, national and state and local responses to climate change in the United States, the role of litigation in confronting major emitters, and the potential role of climate geoengineering approaches. It will also seek to help students develop critical skills of analysis of treaty provisions, legislative language, and court decisions, public speaking and cogent writing.
LEGAL_ST 398-2-20	Advanced Research Seminar II	Abigail Barefoot
LEGAL_ST 398-2-20 Advanced Research Seminar II Legal Studies 398 is a two-quarter sequence (398-1 and 398-2) required for all Legal Studies majors. This seminar will expose students to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to law and legal institutions; over two quarters, students will develop their own research paper on a topic of interest. During winter quarter, students will complete their research projects and present their projects to the class. Students will meet to discuss shared readings, will workshop their paper drafts with one another, will prepare oral presentations based on their research, and will meet individually with the professor and with the Graduate Teaching Fellows.