Our courses treat law as a historically evolving and culturally specific enterprise in which moral argument, interpretive practices, and force are brought to bear on the organization of society.
The Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought department takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study, contextualization and theorizing of law.
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Our faculty are experts in areas ranging from the death penalty, to race and the law, to reconciliation, to the legal and cultural life of trials, to law films.
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Recent senior theses have explored, among many other topics, California’s “three strikes” legislation, literary takes on Brown v. Board of Education and the legal thinking of Hannah Arendt.
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LJST sponsors an annual lecture series that has generated a series of books. Our department also hosts regular scholarly conferences.
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Since its beginnings, LJST has worked to advance the study of law in a liberal arts context rather than as a pre-professional major.
Learn MoreGain understanding of geographies of race in real places, and of the role of legal practices—especially legal argument—in efforts to challenge and reinforce these racial geographies.
Trace the way law emerges as a question within the thinking of Freud, and then explore how post-Freudian thinkers have both applied and rethought psychoanalysis in their own studies of law.
Consider murder in law, literature and popular culture. Examine the legal definitions of homicide and other acts of killing, and inquire into the motives of and responses to those who kill.
The Nasser Hussain Prize honors the memory of a beloved member of the LJST faculty (pictured here) whose work embodies a humanistic conception of law in the liberal arts. It is given annually to a graduating senior.