Independent reading course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
How to handle overenrollment: null
Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Emphasis on independent reading, independent research, and extensive writing
(Analytic Seminar) “Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” This question –the question of the ordering of knowledge and its implications– lies at the heart of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Nearly fifty years after its publication, it is hard to find a discipline in the humanities and the social sciences that has not been influenced by its powerful interventions.
(Research Seminar)
This course will introduce students to the field of international law by considering its historical and contemporary entanglements with empire and imperialism. International law has played a foundational role in articulating the norms that govern relations between the West and the Global South. It contributed, in particular, to authorizing various legal forms of imperial domination, from the early modern laws of conquest down to present ideologies of empire.
This course will explore foundational theories of race, law, and their entanglement in the United States. As scholars of critical race theory have shown, law and legal institutions have been integral to the establishment and perpetuation of racial hierarchies in the United States. At the same time, historians and sociologists have long emphasized that racial categories are socially constructed, in both law and culture. We will explore both sides of the dynamic these theorists identify—the role of race in creating law, and of law in creating race—across the course.
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 lab
This course interrogates the theories of society that emerge alongside the history of the appropriation of land, especially the private property form. We will take up several classical puzzles in the writings of thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Hannah Arendt: how do we come to understand land as available for possession? How should we distinguish between possession, use, and laying waste?
In this course, we will explore how genres of horror have shaped international law, paying specific attention to the figure of the monster in the legal and literary imagination. Defining monstrosity against humanity and civilization has provided a solution to what legal theorist Nasser Hussain has called the “deeply cognitive problem” that plagues attempts to justify state violence and the suspension of the rule of law.
This course provides an introduction to the primary texts and central problems of modern legal theory. Through close study of the field’s founding and pivotal works, we will weigh and consider various ways to think about questions that every study, practice, and institution of law eventually encounters.
