Law, Jurisp & Social Thought 272 - Race and American Law

This course provides an opportunity to think critically about the relation between race and American law.  The course will be anchored in a number of historical inflection points in which the relation between race and the law was thrown into question, contested, reconfigured, and, in some cases, retrenched. Moving from the moment of Constitutional founding, through the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow and the early Civil Rights Movement, encounters in the racial politics of feminism and reproductive justice, the jurisprudence of labor, welfare, and carcerality in the neoliberal era, and the development of antidiscrimination jurisprudence, we will study alongside thinkers in Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist thought, and other twentieth and twenty-first century anti-racisms in order to understand the possibilities and limits of law today. In this way, the course will also move across and offer a chance to reflect on the relation between movement politics, jurisprudence, and theory. 

Limited to 30 students. Spring Semester 2026. Visiting Assistant Professor Siegel.

How to handle overenrollment: Priority given to LJST Majors

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: close reading, attention to papers, class discussion, revisions of writing.