(Research Seminar) When courts decide cases, they engage in knowledge production, and so must use logical, enforceable classifications to distinguish among persons, things, and rights. Legal doctrines that enshrine these classifications may conflict with broader commitments to equality or tradition, even as they help remedy past injuries, protect existing rights, or create durable guidelines for the future.
The spatiality of social life is a fundamental element of human existence, not least through its involvement with power of various sorts. Spatiality is also a significant—and problematic—dimension of law (think of sovereignty, jurisdiction, citizenship). At the same time, law is a significant force through which spatiality is produced, reinforced, contested and transformed. Law literally constitutes social spaces through constitutions, treaties, statutes, contracts, modes of surveillance and policing, and so on. As it does so, it constitutes itself as a force in the world.
The term "waste" is used so widely in common parlance that it hardly seems necessary to consider its meaning. Yet, it is not always clear who has the authority to decide what is useful or efficient, and what is waste. This course takes up this problem of authority and examines how different concepts of waste relate to the law. “Waste” historically has been linked to the legal right to own and manage property.
It is well known that Shakespeare's texts put into play an intricate set of juridical terms and forms. The premise of this course is that we can retrieve from this "putting into play" a unique way of thinking about modern juridical order at the moment of its inception.
This course examines the ways in which historical thinking and imagining operate in the domain of law. History and law are homologous and tightly linked. Law in various guises uses history as its backbone, as a lens through which to view and adjudicate tangled moral problems, and as a means of proof in rendering judgment. Questions of history and precedent are integral to an understanding of the way language and rhetoric operate in the very creation of legal doctrine.
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.
Fall and spring semester. Members of the Department.
See course description for LATI 441. In 2019-20 LATI 442 will read Horace's satires. Three class hours per week. Seminar course.
Requisite: LATI 215, 316, 441 or equivalent.
An introduction to the literature and culture of Augustan Rome through a close reading of selections from Vergil, Horace and the Roman love elegy. Three class hours per week.
Requisite: LATI 202, 215 or equivalent. Spring semester. Professor Zanker.
This course aims at establishing reading proficiency in Latin. Forms and syntax will be reviewed throughout the semester. We will read selections TBA. Three class hours per week.
Requisite: LATI 111 or equivalent. Spring semester. Professor Zanker.
