This course will explore foundational theories of race, law, and their entanglement in the United States. As scholars of critical race theory have shown, law and legal institutions have been integral to the establishment and perpetuation of racial hierarchies in the United States. At the same time, historians and sociologists have long emphasized that racial categories are socially constructed, in both law and culture. We will explore both sides of the dynamic these theorists identify—the role of race in creating law, and of law in creating race—across the course.

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

This course interrogates the theories of society that emerge alongside the history of the appropriation of land, especially the private property form.  We will take up several classical puzzles in the writings of thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Hannah Arendt: how do we come to understand land as available for possession? How should we distinguish between possession, use, and laying waste?

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.

LJST 217 

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.

Murder is the most serious offense against the legal order and is subject to its most punitive responses. It gives meaning to law by establishing the limits of law’s authority and its capacity to tame violence.  Murder is, in addition, a persistent theme in literature and popular culture where it is used to organize narratives of heroism and corruption, good and evil, fate and irrational misfortune. This course uses law, literature, and popular culture to develop their skills in reading, critical analysis of texts, and writing

Spring 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

See course description for LATI 441. 

Three class hours per week. Seminar course.

Requisite: LATI 215, 316, 441 or equivalent. Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Hansen.

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: Translation, discussion

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. Visiting Assistant Professor Janssen.

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: Translation, exams, discussion of supplementary readings