CENTER FOR LEGAL STUDIES

This course broadly provides a cultural analysis of true crime and pop culture. In particular, we’ll uncover why true crime stories seem to go viral (and why certain folks enjoy devouring these narratives). We will think intersectionally, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship shape concepts of “victimhood” and “criminality,” as well as make certain true crime narratives more “popular” than others. Finally, we will develop a robust theoretical toolkit, combining an interdisciplinary range of perspectives from feminist anti-violence studies, critical criminology, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction journalism.

The United States is one of the few constitutional democracies that retains the death penalty. What ethical, legal, and sociological questions does the death penalty raise? How do various individuals experience and make sense of being on death row? What do people write while incarcerated and why? Students in this first-year seminar will engage with these questions through an exploration of the writings of incarcerated individuals on death row and socio-legal scholarship on incarceration more broadly. This course has a particular focus on the genre of prison writing, employing various types of writing, including autobiographies, poetry, letters, and podcasts. By examining these texts, students will explore the issues of capital punishment and mass incarceration more broadly. A primary goal of this class is to sharpen students' writing skills. We will balance reading assignments with various short writing assignments and three essays.

In this course, we will examine the history of the U.S. West as both frontier and region, real and imagined. We will consider topics such as Indian Removal, wars of conquest, law, immigration and migration, race, gender, nationality, class, and environment, often with a focus on the various mythologies of the region. Students will consider the relationship between historical mythologies and historical facts. Course objectives include learning to interpret varied forms of historical evidence and fostering analytical, reading, writing, discussion, and synthetic skills that will help students think and communicate critically about historical and contemporary society and politics. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to read and analyze primary sources carefully and accurately, with attention to the author’s perspective, position, and credibility, and to the source’s context; read, evaluate, summarize, and engage with scholarly works by others; and be able to analyze authors’ arguments for evidence, context, strength, and credibility. Because a primary goal of this class is to sharpen students' writing skills, we will learn through varied writing assignments to make clearly written and structured arguments that are well supported by primary and secondary sources.

Law is everywhere in our daily lives, even when it’s invisible to many of us. What does it mean for a person when their most salient identity is that they are against the law, outside the law, or illegible under the law? How does it structure how they live their lives? Who gets to tell their stories? In this course, we examine personal and social scientific writings of three groups: over-policed Black Americans, undocumented immigrants, and transgender children. Through these writings, we will explore the relationships between law and stigma, surveillance, and recognition. The primary objective for this first-year seminar is to develop your ability to produce evidence-supported and effectively-organized academic writing. The main components of this course will be writing assignments and essays.

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?

Law is everywhere. Law permits, prohibits, enables, legitimates,protects, and prosecutes. Law shapes our day-to-day lives incountless ways. This course examines the connections andrelationships of law and society using an interdisciplinary socialscience approach. As one of the founders of the Law and Societymovement observed, "law is too important to leave to lawyers."Accordingly, this course will borrow from several theoretical,disciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives (such as sociology,history, anthropology, political science, and critical studies) in order toexplore the sociology of law and law's role primarily in the Americancontext. The thematic topics to be discussed include law and socialcontrol; law's role in social change; and law's capacity to reach intocomplex social relations and intervene in existing normativeinstitutions and organizational structures.

Legal Studies Research Methods introduces students to research methods used in interdisciplinary legal studies, including jurisprudence and legal reasoning, qualitative and quantitative social science methods, and historical and textual analysis. The course is a prerequisite for the Advanced Research Seminar in Legal Studies, 398-1,- 2, and is intended to prepare students to design their own research project to be conducted in 398-1, -2. Through exposure to and engagement with interdisciplinary research methods on law and legal processes, the course will provide students with a deeper understanding of law in its historical and social context. The course will provide students with a set of research tools with which to conduct research on legal institutions. The course builds on content from LegalStudies 206/Sociology 206, a prerequisite for this course. While part of the Legal Studies major sequence, the course will enrich the analytic skills of students from many fields who are interested in law or in interdisciplinary research methods. Prerequisite: LEGAL_ST206/SOCIOL 206. Taught with LEGAL_ST 207; may not receive credit for both courses. The topical focus of the course will be violence by the police and capital punishment in the United States. These topics will be explored with interdisciplinary readings and relevant legal cases. Students will be exposed to several research tools and research processes, as they also engage with material on police violence and capital punishment. In addition to shorter assignments, students will develop a research proposal on a topic of their choosing.

How does legal status shape the lives of the 11 million Americans who are undocumented? This course develops the necessary historical context, as well as the conceptual tools to make sense of why people migrate, what shapes their incorporation, how does legal status intersect with other social differences, and how does legal status shape people’s experiences with key social institutions. This class focuses on developing your ability to work with social science data and historical sources, rather than regurgitating facts. The main components of the course are in-class participation and exercises and short papers.

Legal_St 276-0-20 "Crime, Punishment, and Social Control", Abigail Barefoot (Winter 2025)

This course offers a sociological introduction to the topics of crime, punishment, and social control with a focus on the United States. In this course, we will examine various perspectives on crime and social control with particular attention to how society defines criminality, how axes of social difference—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality—intersect with issues of punishment and social control, how we as a society decide how to deal with crime, what effects those decisions have, and how punishment and social control techniques have changed over time. Structured by those broad concerns, we will explore topics including policing, courts and the judicial process, prisons and mass incarceration, and surveillance.

From superhero movies, daytime court shows, and true crime podcasts, "the law" is everywhere in our popular culture, even when we don't see it. In this course, we explore three interrelated questions: 1) how do people think about the law in their everyday life? 2) how does the law shape the production of popular cultures? and 3) how is the law represented in our popular cultures? This class focuses upon building the conceptual foundation and analytical tools for students to answer these questions for themselves

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.

This course examines the relationship between law and the distribution of power in society, with a particular emphasis on law and social change in the United States. Readings will be drawn from the social sciences and history, as well as selected court cases that raise critical questions about the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in American society. Among the material we will examine are the documents made public in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Students should be aware that some of this material is graphic and disturbing.

Key documents and debates in the development of theories of law and jurisprudence. From Aeschylus to contemporary democratic and legal theories and major court cases on topics ranging from torture to Title IX.

How and why do some issues, real or imagined, get blown out of proportion? In this course, we will explore what moral panics are, how they occur, and how we respond to them via legislation and policing. We will think intersectionally, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability shape who or what is seen as “dangerous” or ‘deviant.” Along the way, we will develop a robust theoretical toolkit, combining an interdisciplinary range of perspectives from critical criminology, sociolegal scholarship, cultural studies and creative non-fiction journalism to help us recognize and critique dubious claims. Assignments will include a midterm paper and final paper and presentation.

This course investigates the structure of American government as laid out by the Constitution. It will also examine the many controversies over what, exactly, the Constitution means, who gets to decide, and how. We will discuss judicial review, the powers of Congress and the executive branch, and the relationship between the federal government and the states.

This course investigates the civil rights and civil liberties protected by the Constitution and defined by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This course is intended as a survey of how law has reflected and created distinctions on the basis of gender and sexuality throughout American history. We'll look at legal categories of gender and sexuality that have governed (and, often, continue to govern) the household (including marriage, divorce, and custody), the economy (including employment, property, and credit), and the political sphere (including voting, jury service, and citizenship). Throughout the course, we will examine the relationship between legal rules and social conditions, and discuss how various groups have challenged these legal categories. Taught with GNDR ST 340.

A polity governed by “We the People” is the foundational principle of democracy. Yet, who is included in this “We” and who is not? How is that decided and enforced? What does it mean to live in a country without being part of the governing “We”? This course draws from anthropology, critical race theories, history, political science, sociology, and sociolegal scholarship and explores the deeply intertwined processes of race, politics, and law. These important questions are relevant globally, even though the course focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the U.S. context. The course first develops students’ conceptual toolkit for analyzing the relationships between race, law, and politics. Then, the course examines two core tensions: social differences versus law’s universality and law’s role in maintaining the status quo versus instigating social change. This course will be student discussion-forward and the main component of the course will be a self-directed research paper.

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.

Originating in Slavic words for forced labor, the term “robot” evokes for many an image of blocky metallic humanoids beeping their way through a set of tasks.  Yet robots also carry the specter of revolt. We tend to fear the automated tools we design to mechanize labor, even as we continue creating more of them.  In this class, we will investigate U.S. popular culture’s treatment of robots from early cinema’s “mechanical men” to the modern controversy over generative AI.  Along the way, we will survey U.S. law’s responses to the spread of technology, with particular attention to the problems raised by cutting-edge innovations like self-driving cars and AI-generated artwork.  We will read fiction by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Naomi Kritzer; analyze films like The Iron Giant and The Stepford Wives; and engage with the work of scholars like Donna Haraway, Dennis Yi Tenen, Scott Selisker, and others.  By the end of the course, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to fear robots and what that fear obscures about them (and us).

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.

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.

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.