New Courses for FALL 2024

There several NEW courses being offered FALL 2024

LJST 263 – Islam and the Modern State – NEW Professor Ben-Ismail – Tu Thu 10:00 - 11:20am

LJST 278 - The Law of Colonialism - NEW Professor Ben-Ismail - Tue Thu 2:30 - 3:50pm 

LJST 291 - The Legal & Cultural Lives of AI - Professor Firmani- Tue Thu 10:00 - 11:20am 

LJST 342 – Carl Schmitt and the Jurisprudence of Illiberalism (Research Seminar

– Professor Sitze – Wed 2 – 4:30pm

              *LJST Majors are required to take one Analytic Seminar and one Research Seminar by the end of their Junior year.  Sophomore and Junior majors are strongly encouraged to pre-register for the seminars if they have not yet fulfilled their Analytic or Research Seminar requirements as seminars overenroll quickly.

 

NEW FALL 2024 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

LJST 342 – (RESEARCH SEMINAR) Carl Schmitt and the Jurisprudence of Illiberalism – 
WEDNESDAY 2:00 – 4:30pm, Prof. Sitze

Course Description: Few twentieth-century intellectuals are as controversial and as influential as the German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). A prominent critic of liberal democracy during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Schmitt generated novel theories of dictatorship, political theology, sovereignty, constitutional law, and emergency powers that were studied closely by all sides of the Weimar political spectrum. Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and became one of its most prominent legal thinkers, in which capacity he published numerous antisemitic texts. Following the defeat of Nazism in 1945, American authorities arrested Schmitt and permanently banned him from university teaching. Schmitt’s post-war detention and ban was initiated and led by Amherst College professor Karl Loewenstein (1891-1973), whose 1945 arrest warrant called Schmitt “a man of near-genius rating." From 1945 until his death, Schmitt published and lectured on topics mainly related to international law, the laws of war, and geopolitics. Today Schmitt remains widely condemned for his Nazism and antisemitism, while also being widely regarded as an especially incisive critic of modern legal institutions, theories, and practices. In this research seminar, our primary goal will be to study Schmitt’s key texts in relation to their political, legal, and historical context. Our secondary goal will be to develop methods for parsing the extensive secondary literature that has emerged on topics related to Schmitt's thought. Along the way, we shall pay special attention to the question of Schmitt’s complicity with political evil and ask what lessons, if any, Schmitt’s texts might hold for our own time. 

Limits: enrollment limited to 15 students. 

Prerequisite: LJST 103, LJST 110, and LJST 143 highly recommended

 

LJST 291 – Legal and Cultural Lives of AI – TU THU 10:00 – 11:20am, Prof. Firmani

This course proceeds from the premise that both law and cultural production—literature, film, poetry, etc.—condition how we understand, develop, and interact with artificial intelligence (AI). While the term “AI” only emerged in the United States in the 1950s, the human fascination with artificially intelligent entities has surfaced in literature since Homer’s epics and continues to animate contemporary cultural production as AI itself advances at a rapid pace. As the need for our legal system to regulate these developments becomes increasingly evident, official responses and imaginative solutions proliferate, spawning new fields of inquiry and conditioning existing ones.

In this course, we will engage with fictional works—both literature and film—in order to trace how imagining AI has evolved historically. We will also explore legal texts—caselaw, statutes and regulations, and legal scholarship—in order to track how humans have used laws and the legal system to account for the social, political, and economic changes induced, or threatened, by AI. Taking inspiration from the nascent field of Critical AI Studies as well as scholars working in Science and Technology Studies, we will consider AI not solely as technological: instead, we will attend to how cultural work that has imagined AI has conditioned the laws meant to regulate it, and, in turn, how these laws and regulations have conditioned such cultural work. 

Limits: enrollment limited to 30 students. 

 

LJST 278 – The Law of Colonialism – TU THU 2:30 – 3:50pm, Prof. Ben-Ismail

This course examines law, courts, and legal encounters in colonial contexts. We will focus on European empires and their colonies around the world in both the early modern and modern periods. We will study the innerworkings of colonialism through a critical examination of the legal practices of colonial empires. Students will learn how colonial legal cultures legitimized, enshrined and sustained colonial violence and how colonized subjects navigated these fraught legal landscapes. How did the law make colonial rule possible and conversely how did it contribute to the dismantling of such rule? We will address these questions through case-studies covering a broad variety of colonial sites including early modern Latin America and the colonial Atlantic, French West (and North) Africa, British India, and the modern Middle East during the Mandate period. 

Limits: enrollment limited to 30 students. 

 

LJST 263 – Islam and the Modern State – TU THU 10:00 – 11:20am, Prof. Ben-Ismail

This course explores the relationship between Islam and the modern state from the nineteenth century to the present. Muslim jurists and intellectuals have long grappled with the role of Islam in the modern state. They have advocated for a great variety of legal arrangements, ranging from the strict separation of religion and state to the adoption of constitutional clauses establishing Islam as an official religion. In this course, students will explore the genealogy of these debates and engage with the questions they brought to the fore: what does it mean for Islam to be the religion of the state? Is there a place for Islamic law in the legal systems of these modern states? How have various actors (Islamist movements, Muslim jurists, state leaders, revolutionary activists, etc.) made sense of –and competed over– the meaning and implications of Islam’s relationship to the state?

Students will read primary sources written by individuals who lived in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: political essays, legal treatises, theological texts, constitutional articles, parliamentary debates, etc. All readings will be provided in English translation. There will be opportunities to engage with sources in their original language for students with reading skills in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.

Limits: enrollment limited to 30 students. 

 

 

 

 

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