If someone attempts to buy a stolen iPad and it turns out that the iPad wasn’t stolen, should the state prosecute an attempt to purchase stolen goods? Under what circumstances should the use of a voodoo doll to inflict injury be considered an aggravated assault or an attempted murder? If my family stole your family’s land 150 years ago and has worked it since, what (if anything) are you owed? Law has a unique approach to such situations because it has its own internal logic and an account of judgment that differs from what we typically recognize as moral judgment.

This course approaches the problem of judgment and narrative in the context of a “crisis of judgment” that plagued the eighteenth-century novel and returned in the twentieth century. In this crisis, we see either a suspension of judgment (judgment is withheld, deemed condemnatory, moralizing, idiosyncratic) or an insistence that judgment be reached objectively, scientifically, or we see it as simply necessary. The novel stages and complicates this crisis. We will ask whether novels teach readers how to judge others or complicate and forestall judgment?

The influence of Roman law far exceeded the spatial and temporal limits of the Republic and Empire that produced it. Concepts and doctrines from the Roman legal tradition have informed how subsequent societies have understood the idea of private property, for instance, and they have also played a role in the evolution of the law of the sea, international law, and human rights law.

(Offered as HIST 132 [EU] and EUST 133.) At the turn of the century, Mark Twain described Europe as a paradise of “tranquil contentment,” prosperity and genuine freedom. Labelled as the “Age of Extremes,” however, Europe’s twentieth century was marked by fierce ideological and political conflict, war and genocide and the beginning of the end of a domination over world affairs that the European nations had exercised for centuries. By 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and lauded once again as a beacon of relative stability and peace.

(Offered as HIST 132 [EU] and EUST 133.) At the turn of the century, Mark Twain described Europe as a paradise of “tranquil contentment,” prosperity and genuine freedom. Labelled as the “Age of Extremes,” however, Europe’s twentieth century was marked by fierce ideological and political conflict, war and genocide and the beginning of the end of a domination over world affairs that the European nations had exercised for centuries. By 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and lauded once again as a beacon of relative stability and peace.