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 examines the relationship between law and the distribution of power in society, with a particular emphasis on law and social change in the United States. Readings will be drawn from the social sciences and history, as well as selected court cases that raise critical questions about the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in American society. Among the material we will examine are the documents made public in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Students should be aware that some of this material is graphic and disturbing.

Contact the Professor directly to get permission to add the course: khoffman@northwestern.edu

Anthropology (and particularly cultural and linguistic anthropology) has long been concerned with questions of social justice and inequality to counter balance its earlier advocacy for cultural relativism. This ethnography-based course focuses on human rights discourses, documents, and actors who seek individual or collective rights and recognition through legal and paralegal means, and the social processes and changes that affect them through a broad, cross-cultural approach. Case studies concern categories of people who have been situationally and historically marginalized (refugees and migrants, prisoners, children, women, LGBT, religious minorities, etc). The course considers the concept and practice of human rights through local-level organization, legal advocacy, humanitarianism, and law at multiple scales (local, state, global), including international institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.

Legal Studies 398-1,2 is a two-quarter sequence required for all Legal Studies majors. This seminar exposes students to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to law and legal institutions; over two quarters, students will develop their own research paper on a topic of interest.