Spring 2025 Class Schedule: Center for Legal Studies

Spring 2025 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: American Outlaw: Writings about Living and Being Outside the Law	Jesse Yeh	MW 12:30-1:50
LEGAL_ST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: American Outlaw: Writings about Living and Being Outside the Law 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.
LEGAL_ST 207-0-20	Legal Studies Research Methods (also SOCIOL 227)	Robert Nelson	TTH 9:30-10:50
LEGAL_ST 207-0-20 Legal Studies Research Methods (also SOCIOL 227) 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.
LEGAL_ST 245-0-1	Undocumented Americans	Jesse Yeh	MW 3:30-4:50
LEGAL_ST 245-0-1 Undocumented Americans 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 310-0-1	Moral Panics	Abigail Barefoot	MW 3:30-4:50
LEGAL_ST 310-0-1 Moral Panics 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.
LEGAL_ST 320-0-20	The Fourteenth Amendment (taught with HISTORY 320-0-20)	Kate Masur; Joanna Grisinger	TTH 9:30-10:50
LEGAL_ST 320-0-20 The Fourteenth Amendment (taught with HISTORY 320-0-20) The Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, promised equal protection and due process for all, and it declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens of the United States. The amendment’s consequences for American federalism were vast. But the change was even greater than that, for Americans began to understand rights differently. Much of today’s rights-based culture—including ideas about the right to marry, the right to privacy, and the right to be free of discrimination—is founded in the Fourteenth Amendment and its legal and cultural legacies.
LEGAL_ST 333-0-20	Constitutional Law II (also POLI_SCI 333)	Joanna Grisinger	TTH 2:00-3:20
LEGAL_ST 333-0-20 Constitutional Law II (also POLI_SCI 333) This course investigates the civil rights and civil liberties protected by the Constitution and defined by the U.S. Supreme Court.
LEGAL_ST 383-0-20	Gender, Sexuality and the Carceral State (also GNDR ST 351)	Abigail Barefoot	MW 9:30-10:50
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	American Lawyering: Education and Practice	Seth Meyer	M 10:00-12:50
LEGAL_ST 394-LK-20 American 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.