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 MoreConsider how the speculative imagination approaches topics such as civil rights, reproduction, privacy, and property, and analyze texts and films alongside legal cases and theories of justice.
Drawing upon literary theory, imaginative writing, and cultural examples, explore the multiple meanings of "free speech" and their deployment in American public culture.
Explore the role of rights in addressing inequality, discrimination, and violence by tracing the evolution of legal strategies aimed at addressing injustice.
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.