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.
Reminder: LJST MAJOR REQUIREMENTS
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 MoreThis course examines the ways in which historical thinking and imagining operate in the domain of law. History and law are homologous and tightly linked.
This course explores the effort to control the violence and chaos of war with legal rules and processes, asking whether the law of armed conflict has “civilized” the waging of war or simply serves as another tool in the arsenal of armed conflict.
This course interrogates the theories of society that emerge alongside the history of the appropriation of land, especially the private property form, taking up several classical puzzles in the writings of thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Hannah Arendt.
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.