CENTER FOR LEGAL STUDIES

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. 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.

Course description coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Survey of laws, regulations, and cultural norms regarding nonhuman animals and animal ownership in the United States.  History of animal protection movement, wildlife regulation, hunting and fishing rights, livestock care and slaughter, animal experimentation, anti-cruelty legislation, and companion animal law.  Prerequisite: Legal_St 206-0 or Poli_Sci 230-0, or instructor approval.

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 Studies 398-1,2 is a two-quarter sequence required for all Legal Studies majors. This seminar exposes 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.

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.