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.
NOTICE for SPRING 2020, posted March 27, 2020
In light of the recent change at Amherst to allow students to convert their current courses into Pass/Fail if they want to, the LJST Department is officially announcing the following:
Courses taken in the spring 2020 semester with a Pass grade will count toward the major.
The Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought (LJST) does not administer a placement examination or otherwise determine what a student’s first course in LJST should be. We generally recommend that students who wish to study law with us begin by taking any of the several 100-level courses we offer. Prior to graduation, LJST majors are required to take LJST 103 (Legal Institutions), LJST 110 ( Intro to Legal Theory) and LJST 143 (Law’s History). But it is not a matter of department policy that any of these courses be a student’s first course in LJST.
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.
Engage a range of debates within political philosophy and legal theory, including the legal dimensions of class inequality in contexts such as labor law, welfare and poverty law, education and criminal justice.
The seminar will consider the origins of the human rights movement, its Western biases, and several vital tensions, such as elitist vs. grassroots approaches.
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.