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 MoreThrough the close reading of four of Shakespeare's texts, we will trace the composition of some of the most fundamental problems of modern Anglophone jurisprudence (such as person and impersonation, inheritance and usurpation, contract and oath, and more).
Demands to reform, defund, or abolish the police have a long history, even as contemporary calls to curb law enforcement are hotly debated. This course will examine cases and statutory law, critical race and feminist scholarship, political theory, and literary and visual culture to guide our inquiry.
In this course, we will explore the problematics of passion in criminal law and laws regulating sexuality, marriage, and family by asking, how love, in its various guises, manifests itself in law and legal theory, and indeed partly constitutes law itself.
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.