What is law? What is the relationship between law and morality? What roles does law play in society? How and why does law matter? This class explores such fundamental questions about the roles law plays in organizing contemporary social and political life. We will consider what and whose interests are served by law, the way law shapes identities and hierarchical power relationships, and how both formal law and popular understandings of law impact social interactions. In the process, we will explore how we are all legal actors as well as legal subjects.
We will study how individuals and organized groups mobilize rights and justice claims in formal legal processes and through more informal appeals to communal norms. We will also consider how knowledge of law is built- through mass media and popular culture, through the work of scholars across different academic disciplines, and through lay knowledge based on direct experiences with law.
Case materials will focus primarily on the United States, but the course also draws occasionally on comparative cross-national and global perspectives.
The interdisciplinary course materials cultivate an understanding of law based on distinctive social science and humanistic modes of inquiry regarding politics and power. Course materials include social science, humanistic, and philosophical studies of law, but only a few court cases. The course also does not aim to give you current knowledge of what the law requires in different topical areas. The course instead aims to develop an understanding of law that can help to make you to navigate the social world of law as an engaged citizen well into the future.
There are no formal prerequisites for this class, although a basic knowledge of American politics and social organization is helpful.
Grading is based on two exams, two short analytic papers, and participation in discussion section.