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 ten courses.
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) plus one analytical and one research seminar usually taken by the end of junior year.
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 MoreBy focusing on the United States Supreme Court, we will consider various attempts to justify that institution’s power to offer final decisions and binding interpretations of the Constitution that upset majoritarian preferences.
Through the close reading of three Shakespearean texts, we will trace the way these works "put into play" some of the most basic concepts of modern Anglophone jurisprudence.
Law lives in images which today saturate our culture and which have a power all their own, and the moving image provides a domain in which legal power operates independently of law’s formal institutions. This course takes up law and film to explore law’s image and the imagined life of law.
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.