This course examines law, courts, and legal encounters in colonial contexts. We will focus on European empires and their colonies around the world in both the early modern and modern periods. We will study the inner workings of colonialism through a critical examination of the legal practices of colonial empires. Students will learn how colonial legal cultures legitimized, enshrined and sustained colonial violence and how colonized subjects navigated these fraught legal landscapes.

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 explores the relationship between Islam and the modern state from the nineteenth century to the present. Muslim jurists and intellectuals have long grappled with the role of Islam in the modern state. They have advocated for a great variety of legal arrangements, ranging from the strict separation of religion and state to the adoption of constitutional clauses establishing Islam as an official religion.

In the twentieth century, American feminist movements made significant strides in securing suffrage, formal equality under the law, reproductive justice, and the possibility of economic independence through paid labor.  And yet, the entry of (some) women into the public sphere has only intensified the urgency of a series of underlying questions: Is it desirable to demand legal transformations in the name of the identity “woman,” and if so, how should we incorporate considerations of gender and queerness, class, race, ability, and nationality?

“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.

In the United States, the idea of free speech is held to be both a political and moral ideal. The First Amendment makes freedom of speech a centerpiece of liberal democratic values and processes, and thus of American identity itself. But what, precisely, do we mean when we link the ideas of freedom and speech? What kinds of speech, and what kinds of freedom, are implicated in that linkage? Correlatively, what does it mean to "censor"?

LJST 217 

This course takes the recent resurgence of the American Labor Movement as an occasion for an extended case study in the relation between law, labor, and action.  Our understanding of the relation between law and action is structured by a persistent opposition: if it is action that ushers in the new against the constraints of existing law, then it is law which is called upon to protect what is worth protecting of the existing order and to avoid the sometimes destructive character of action.  And yet this story always risks displacing another crucial set of theoretical and historica

This course will examine the relationship between legal institutions and democratic practice. How do judicial decisions balance the preferences of the majority and the rights of minorities? Is it possible to reconcile the role that partisan dialogue and commitment play in a democracy with an interest in the neutral administration of law? How does the provisional nature of legislative choice square with the finality of judicial mandate?

Fall semester. 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: Intensive reading, writing, translation