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.
A major in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought consists of a minimum of nine courses, for students in the classes of 2021 and 2022. For students in the classes of 2023 and 2024 the minimum requirement is ten courses.
** A student who would graduate in 2021 but takes time off and graduates in 2021E would need 9 courses.
If the student graduates in 2022, they still would need 9. If they became a 2022E they would need 10.
2020-2021 FGO Policy – The LJST Analytic and Research Seminars required for the major may NOT be taken as an FGO course and counted 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.
Explore how non-state actors engage formal legal institutions to shape or reform law in order to affect the conditions of social life.
This seminar will examine contemporary theories of interpretation as they inform legal and literary understandings. Readings will include works of literature, court cases and contributions by theorists of interpretation.
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.