(Offered as POSC 474 [SC] and LJST 374.) This seminar explores how the civil rights movement began a process of social change and identity-based activism. We evaluate the successes and failures of “excluded” groups’ efforts to use the law. We primarily focus on the recent scholarship of theorists, legal professionals, and activists to define “post-identity politics” strategies and to counteract the social processes that “normalize” persons on the basis of gender, sexuality, disability, and class.

(Analytic Seminar) The discipline of legal theory has the task of making law meaningful to itself. But there is a variety of competing legal theories that can make law meaningful in divergent ways. By what measure are we to assess their adequacy? Is internal coherence the best standard or should legal theory strive to accord with the extra-legal world? Then too, the institutions and practices of law are components of social reality and, therefore, as amenable to sociological or cultural analysis as any other component.

How has law structured who belongs and who is foreign to the United States? In this class, we will take a broad historical look at the law of citizenship to answer this question.  Beginning with the founding of the nation, we will consider the various ways that law has defined the fundamental privileges and obligations of national belonging, and then policed the boundaries between those entitled to the privileges of citizenship and those denied them.

Is U.S. law fundamentally inward-looking or is it “cosmopolitan”?  Do jurisdictional boundaries and geographic borders constrain law or does law glide easily across them?  Does law restrain or facilitate government power in international affairs?  In this class we will consider the history of U.S. law and international affairs from the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the U.S.

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.  Moreover, law’s use of history also has a history of its own, and our present understanding of

(Offered as LJST 105 and BLST 147 [US].) Understandings of and conflicts about place are of central significance to the experience and history of race and race relations in America.

Fall and spring semester.  Members of the Department.

The authors read in LATI 441 and 442 vary from year to year, the selection being made according to the interests and needs of the students. Both 441 and 442 may be repeated for credit, providing only that the topic is not the same. In 2014-15 LATI 441 will read Lucretius. Three class hours per week. Seminar course.

Requisite: LATI 215 or 316 or equivalent.  Fall semester. Professor D. Sinos.

This course will examine Catullus’ poetic technique, as well as his place in the literary history of Rome. Extensive reading of Catullus in Latin, together with other lyric poets of Greece and Rome in English. Three class hours per week.

Requisite: LATI 202 or equivalent.  Fall semester. Professor Russell.

This course prepares students to read classical Latin. No prior knowledge of Latin is required. Three class hours per week.

Fall semester. Professor van den Berg.