(Offered as AMST 216 and BLST 240 [CLA/US]) Who is an “Afro-Latino”? Are they Latinos or are they Black? Afro-Latinos are African-descended peoples from Latin America and the Caribbean who reside in the United States. In this course, a focus on Afro-Latinos allows us to study the history of racial ideologies and racial formation in the Americas.

Independent work under the guidance of a tutor assigned by the Department. Open to senior LJST majors who wish to pursue a self-defined project in reading and writing and to work under the close supervision of a faculty member.

Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

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

(Research Seminar) In this course, we will consider the entwined cultural and legal creation of debt. Through literature, film, and scholarship, we will trace how works of cultural production have imagined debt, mapping how relations of indebtedness manifest themselves in figurative and affective registers as much as economic ones—how, in other words, does the imperative to repay debt rely on the cultural meaning ascribed to feeling indebted?

(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.

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.

The political, economic, and philosophical figure of the “death sentence,” although it has archaic roots, continues to haunt the twenty-first century. Athens killed the philosopher Socrates because he was dangerous to the polis, and philosophy has enshrined this death sentence as both its mythical origin and its most modern moment. Having cut off the head of the king, French revolutionaries and their critics fiercely debated whether mercy or execution would better distance their new social order from repressive forms of monarchical sovereignty.

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

Fearlessly independent, tenaciously unclassifiable, frequently controversial, and always thought-provoking, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is without question one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Setting aside the conventional interpretation of Arendt as a political theorist, this course will focus on Arendt’s contributions to the study of law, with special attention to Arendt’s unusual inquiries into human rights, international criminal law, constitutional law, and civil disobedience.

“Nature” is at once among the most basic of concepts and among the most ambiguous. Law is often called upon to clarify the meaning of nature. In doing so it raises questions about what it means to be human.