CENTER FOR LEGAL STUDIES

Law is everywhere. Law permits, prohibits, enables, legitimates, protects, and prosecutes citizens. Law shapes our daily lives in countless ways. This course examines the connections and relationships of law and society using an interdisciplinary social science approach. As one of the founders of the Law and Society movement observed, "Law is too important to leave to lawyers." Accordingly, this course will borrow from several theoretical, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives (including sociology, history, anthropology, political science, and psychology) in order to explore the sociology of law and law's role. This course introduces the relationship between social, cultural, political, and economic forces on the one hand, and legal rules, practices, and outcomes, on the other. We focus on several important questions about law including: How do culture, structure, and conflict explain the relationship between law and society? Why do people obey the law? Why do people go to court? How does the legal system work? What is the role of lawyers, judges, and juries? How does law on the books differ from law in action? How do social problems become legal ones? How can law create or constrain social change?

This course investigates the structure of American government as laid out by the Constitution. It will also examine the many controversies over what, exactly, the Constitution means, who gets to decide, and how. We will discuss judicial review, the powers of Congress and the executive branch, and the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Law and Culture is a seminar-style introduction to the anthropology of law as the intersection of law, culture, and language. Through both theoretical and ethnographic texts, the course considers legal institutions as important sites for the creation, negotiation, and reformulation of social and cultural norms and practices. We consider the ways in which culture and language shape law, and the ways in which law conditions and constrains culture and language. Throughout, our attention remains on individual actors interacting with legal systems and principles and people's expectations of the law. We examine in cross-cultural perspective such matters as evidence, persuasion, performance, and discourse on human rights, legal pluralism, indigenous populations, globalization, and gender. Throughout, questions of power, agency, and inequality (especially around gender and race/ethnicity) animate our investigations. Most of our readings concern Muslim societies or populations, so we will examine intersections between various interpretations of Islamic law and other legal traditions. The legal anthropological texts we read give close attention to spoken and/or written language. The linguistic anthropological readings take the courtroom and/or disputes as their object of analysis.