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.
Learn More
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.
Learn More
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.
Learn More
LJST sponsors an annual lecture series that has generated a series of books. Our department also hosts regular scholarly conferences.
Learn More
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.
Address some of the foundational questions posed by radical evil to the legal imagination, by focusing on a range of legal responses to the crimes of the Holocaust.
Seek to understand how neoliberalism posed law as a problem for thought. Then explore how various critics of neoliberalism have sought to expose and question the legal theories at its origin.
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.