Fall 2025 Class Schedule: Center for Legal Studies

Fall 2025 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 101-7	College Seminar: Law and the Civil Rights Movement	Joanna Grisinger
LEGAL_ST 101-7 College Seminar: Law and the Civil Rights Movement This course explores the relationship between law and civil rights in modern American history – in particular, African Americans’ efforts to secure their legal, political, civil, and economic rights. How and why did the American civil rights movement pursue legal change (in the courts, in the legislatures, and in administrative agencies)? How and why did legal actors (including judges, White House officials, members of Congress, and state governors) engage with civil rights reformers? What are the benefits of pursuing legal change, and what are the limits? In order to answer these and other questions, we will read and discuss material including court cases, statutes, speeches, memoirs, newspaper articles, photographs, and songs.
LEGAL_ST 206-0-20	Law and Society (also SOCIOL 206)	Laura Beth Nielsen
LEGAL_ST 206-0-20 Law and Society (also SOCIOL 206) 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_ST 211-0-1	Law and Popular Culture	Jesse Yeh
LEGAL_ST 211-0-1 Law and Popular Culture 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.
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 332-0-1	Constitutional Law I (also POLI SCI 332)	Joanna Grisinger
LEGAL_ST 332-0-1 Constitutional Law I (also POLI SCI 332) This course investigates the structure of American government as laid out by the Constitution and defined by the Supreme Court. It will also examine the many controversies over what, exactly, the Constitution means, who gets to decide, and how.
LEGAL_ST 340-0-1	Gender, Sexuality and the Law (also GNDR ST 340)	Abigail Barefoot
LEGAL_ST 340-0-1 Gender, Sexuality and the Law (also GNDR ST 340) 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.
LEGAL_ST 348-0-1	Race, Politics and the Law	Jesse Yeh
LEGAL_ST 348-0-1 Race, Politics and the Law 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.
LEGAL_ST 350-0-1	Psychology and the Law (also PSYCH 340)	Sara Broaders
LEGAL_ST 350-0-1 Psychology and the Law (also PSYCH 340) This course explores the complex intersection of psychology and law, examining how psychological research informs legal policies and practices. Topics include expert testimony, forensic assessment methods and limitations, legal competence, and the insanity defense. The course also addresses the role of psychological syndromes such as Battered Women’s Syndrome and Rape Trauma Syndrome in court, criminal profiling, memory issues including eyewitness testimony, interrogation and confessions, jury selection and decision-making, as well as the psychological aspects of prisons and the death penalty. Prerequisite: Psychology 110
LEGAL_ST 360-0-1	Animal Law (also ENVR_POL 360)	Nicolette Bruner
LEGAL_ST 360-0-1 Animal Law (also ENVR_POL 360) 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.
LEGAL_ST 376-0-20	Policing Protest	Abigail Barefoot
LEGAL_ST 376-0-20 Policing Protest This course will introduce students to the historical and contemporary relationship between the law, police and protesters within the United States. We will critically examine the diversity of actions, tactics, accounts, and tools of both the police and protesters. While this specific focus will anchor our analysis, the course will address broad and important questions about public order, constitutionality, the role of the courts and the police, democracy and the rule of law, surveillance, and legal guidelines related to public assembly, speech, and protest.
LEGAL_ST 398-1-20	Advanced Research Seminar (Majors Only)	Nicolette Bruner
LEGAL_ST 398-1-20 Advanced Research Seminar (Majors Only) 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.