***Always check the Campus Solutions Schedule of Classes for the latest most up-to-date info.***
NOTE: For Old Plan Areas, please refer to the ‘Courses’ list for the Old Plan.
R1B: Globalization and Transnational Law, Karen Seif, 4 units, Area N/A
NOTE: R1B courses must be taken for a letter grade.
**This course is lower division and will not count towards the major.**
This course teaches Reading and Composition under the substantive theme of transnational law. The assigned readings will range from pure legal scholarship to interdisciplinary writings. Through legal scholarship, we will observe how relevant actors create and enforce transnational law. The legal view will be compared to the view presented in the social science fields, particularly international relations. There, we will also explore the effect of globalization on national legal systems, with a particular focus on transnational judicial communication. The seminar readings will uncover the tension in modern scholarship on international law and suggest avenues for reconciliation in our understanding of this field.
39D: Current Political & Moral Conflicts & the Constitution Frosh/Soph Seminar, Pomerantz, 2 units, Area N/A
**This course is lower division and will not count towards the major.**
We will read Supreme Court cases, as well as political and legal commentary from across the political spectrum, and consider not only the opinions of the Justices, but also why they hold those opinions. We will seek to discover the way in which courts use authority and craft law. Here is an article about the course (video included).
88: Crime and Punishment: taking the measure of the U.S. Justice System, Dag MacLeod, 2 units
**This course is lower division and will not count towards the major.**
NOTE: This Data Science Connector course is meant to be taken concurrently with Computer Science C8/Statistics C8/Information C8: Foundations of Data Science. Students may take more than one 88 (data science connector) course if they wish, ideally concurrent with or after having taken the C8 course.
100: Foundations of Legal Studies, Simon, 4 units, Core (H, SS)
This is a liberal arts course designed to introduce students to the foundational frameworks and cross-disciplinary perspectives from humanities and social sciences that distinguish legal studies as a scholarly field. It provides a comparative and historical intro to forms, ideas, institutions, and systems of law and sociological ordering. It highlights basic theoretical problems and scholarly methods for understanding questions of law and justice.
LS 102 – Policing and Society, Perry, 4 units, Area I
This course examines the American social institution of policing with particular emphasis on urban law enforcement. It explores the social, economic and cultural forces that pull policing in the direction of state legal authority and power as well as those that are a counter-weight to the concentration of policing powers in the state. Special attention is given to how policing shapes and is shaped by the urban landscape, legal to cultural.
LS 103 – Theories of Law and Society, Lieberman, 4 units, Core (H, SS) or Area II
A historical examination of major interpretations of law, morals and social development, with special emphasis on the social thought of the 18th and 19th centuries. The course covers Montesquieu, Maine, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and other theorists.
LS 105 – Theoretical Foundations of Criminal Law, Dan-Cohen, 3 units, Area I or II or III
Criminal law raises fundamental theoretical issues that have occupied philosophers over the years. In the course we will discuss a selection of articles that bring to bear such a philosophical perspective on important aspects of criminal law. Topics include justification of punishment, foundations of blame and responsibility, substantive values protected by criminal law, significance of actual harm, liability of groups and other collectivities, and virtues and limits of the rule of law.
LS 106 – Philosophy of Law, Kutz, 4 units, Area IV or V
This course explores philosophical themes bearing on the nature of the law and its relationship to morality: e.g., What is law—does its claim rest only on social processes or does law necessarily embody moral claims? Do we have an obligation to obey the law? What are the moral limits of legal punishment? The course will sharpen students’ skills in practical reasoning through the analysis of logical argument. The materials consist of readings from the assigned text and additional readings available on bCourses. The format will be a combination of lecture and classroom discussion, with a substantial number of ungraded group debates and simulations.
LS 110.1 – Wall Street to Main Street, Brilliant/Solomon, 4 units, Areas III (room-shared with American Studies)
As longstanding metaphors in American history and culture, “Wall Street” and “Main Street” typically refer to streets that intersect at right angles and places that represent the antithesis of each other. In this rendering, Wall Street is home to nefarious big banks and greedy financiers, while Main Street is home to wholesome “mom-and-pop” shops patronized by ordinary people of modest means. What’s good for one is not good for the other. This course, which will be co-taught by a historian and corporate law professor, will examine critical junctures in the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street in American history and culture, how and why Wall Street and Main Street have been understood to point in opposite directions, the extent to which that understanding makes sense, and how and why the relationship between Wall Street and Main Street has evolved over time.
LS 110.2 – Law and Rights in Authoritarian States, Stern, 4 units, Area IV or V
This course investigates the reasons why authoritarian leaders devolve power to courts and the control strategies they deploy to keep judges, lawyers and plaintiffs in check. The course will mix more theoretical readings on approaches to law and the logic of courts with empirical studies of how law works in four settings: Nazi Germany, East Germany, China, and Russia. Throughout the semester, we will ask ourselves how world historical time (e.g. the rise of rights talk, the global trend increased judicial power) and regime type (e.g. military dictatorship, competitive authoritarianism, one-party states) influence both the letter and the practice of law. In addition to scholarly books and articles, course materials will include original court documents as well as memoirs and films that illustrate how ordinary people experience the legal system.
LS 132AC – Immigration and Citizenship, Prof. Pratheepan Gulasekaram (from Santa Clara University), 4 units, Area II or IV
We often hear that America is a “nation of immigrants.” This representation of the U.S. does not explain why some are presumed to belong and others are not. We will examine both historical and contemporary law of immigration and citizenship to see how law has shaped national identity and the identity of immigrant communities . In addition to scholarly texts, we will learn to read and analyze excerpts of cases and the statute that governs immigration and citizenship, the Immigration and Nationality Act.
138: The Supreme Court & Public Policy, Brown, 4 units, Core (SS) or Area IV or V
This course examines a number of leading U.S. Supreme Court decisions in terms of what policy alternatives were available to the Court and which ones it chose. Prospective costs and benefits of these alternatives and who will pay the costs and who gets the benefits of them are considered. Among the areas considered are economic development, government regulation of business, national security, freedom of speech and discrimination. Readings are solely of Supreme Court decisions.
154: Human Rights Research & Practice, Koenig/Stover, 4 units, Area IV
This course provides an overview of international human rights, including the field’s historical and theoretical foundations; the jurisprudence of international human rights; empirical insights from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, and anthropology; and emerging trends in human rights practice.
159: Introduction to Law & Sexuality, Katyal, 4 units, Area II or IV
This course focuses on the legal regulation of sexuality, and the social and historical norms and frameworks that affect its intersection with sex, gender, race, disability, and class. We will critically examine how the law shapes sexuality and how sexuality shapes the law. Our subject matter is mostly constitutional, covering sexuality’s intersection with privacy, freedom of expression, gender identity and expression, equal protection, reproduction, kinship, and family formation, among other subjects. We will study case law, legal articles, and other texts (including visual works) that critically engage issues of sexuality, citizenship, nationhood, religion, and the public and private spheres domestically and internationally.
160: Punishment, Culture, and Society, Perry, 4 units, Core (H, SS) or Area I or II
This course surveys the development of Western penal practices, institutions, and ideas (what David Garland calls “penality”) from the eighteenth-century period to the present. Our primary focus will be on penal practices and discourses in United States in the early 21st century. In particular we will examine the extraordinary growth of US penal sanctions in the last quarter century and the sources and consequences of what some have called “mass imprisonment.” To gain some comparative perspective the course will also take up contemporary penality (or penalities) in Europe, South Africa, Central America, and Asia, as well as US penality and society at some earlier conjunctures.
In our analysis of penality, we will draw upon a range of social science theories with general relevance but with particularly rich application to the study of punishment. These theories provide the “tool kits” we will use to interpret and analyze multiplex implications of punishment and its relationship to changes in economic, social, and political relations associated with modernization and more recently the globalization of modern capitalism. The course will examine many examples of penal practices and the ideas associated with them including mass imprisonment, the death penalty, and restorative justice. In the last portion of the class we will examine the recent crisis in California’s juvenile prisons through the lenses both of different social theories and the examples of different national and historical penal patterns.
173: Making Empire: Law & the Colonization of America, Tomlins, 4 units, Area II or V
This is an intro to the origins, development, and expansion of European settlement on the North American mainland. We will concentrate on the impulses – commercial, ideological, and racial – that drove European colonizing; the migrations (voluntary and forced) that sustained it; and the political and legal “technologies” that supplied it with definition, explanation, and institutional capacity. We will pay attention to themes of sovereignty, civic identity, race, and “manifest destiny” and will discuss how law provided both the language and technical capacity to transform territory into property, people into slaves, and the land’s indigenous inhabitants into “others” who existed “outside” the civic order of the American Republic.
174: Comparative Constitutional Law: The Case of Israel, Amnon Reichman, 4 units, Area IV or V
The seminar will provide an introduction to the comparative study of constitutional law through the lens of Israeli constitutional jurisprudence – a jurisprudence built explicitly on the foundations of a variety of other constitutional systems, reflecting the diversity of approaches to constitutionalism. Through this comparative framework students will learn basic constitutional theory as well as explore some of the major constitutional debates in Israeli contemporary law. The constitutional theory part of the course will discuss the formation of Israeli constitution in comparison with the structure of other constitutions such as the U.S. Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This framework will introduce the central notions of constitutionalism – the ideas that that constitutions can (and should) limit government; the role of the judiciary in interpreting and enforcing the constitution; and the importance of constitutional rights. Among the constitutional debates that the class will explore are topics such as freedom of expression and freedom of association, equality, the right of human dignity, due process, social rights, freedom of occupation, freedom of religion etc. These topics will also be looked at from a comparative perspective drawing upon different constitutional regimes such as the Canadian Charter and the constitution of South Africa.
LS 177: American Legal & Constitutional History, Brown, 4 units, Core (H) or Area II or III or V
This course explores the history of American legal institutions and doctrine from colonial times to the present. It deals both with the history of American constitutional law (through the study of major U.S. Supreme Court opinions) and with the development of certain important bodies of non-constitutional law, such as the law of property, the law of torts (civil wrongs), and criminal law. In exploring how American law has developed over time the course may serve as something of an introduction to our current legal and constitutional order.
LS 182 – Law, Politics, and Society, Feeley, 4 units, Core (SS) or Area IV or V
This course examines the theory and practice of legal institutions in performing several major functions of law: allocating authority, defining relationships, resolving conflict, adapting to social change, and fostering social solidarity. In doing so, it will assess the nature and limits of law as well as consider alternative perspectives on social control and social change.
190.1: Constitutions in Comparative Perspective, Shapiro, 4 units, Area V
An examination of constitutional decision making in a number of countries based on selected high court opinions.
190.2: Data, Prediction and Law, Marshall, 4 units, Area I
Data, Prediction, and Law is a new Legal Studies seminar that allows students to explore different data sources that scholars and government officials use to make generalizations and predictions in the realm of law. The course will also introduce critiques of predictive techniques in law. Students will apply the statistical and Python programming skills from Foundations of Data Science to examine a traditional social science dataset, “big data” related to law, and legal text data. NOTE: Students should have taken Stats C8 or CS 61 and an introductory Stats course.
190.3: Comparative Criminal Justice Reform, Hadar Dancig Rosenberg, 4 units, Areas I
This course will introduce current criminal justice reforms, focusing on examples from the Israeli and American criminal justice system. We will examine a variety of punitive and non-punitive justice mechanisms that have proliferated in recent years as social responses for crime, including Pre-Settlement Conferences, Restorative Justice, Community courts, Drug Courts, Diversions, Hybrid Civil-Criminal processes and even Social Media as an arena for seeking justice. We will discuss the background for their emergence and explore their perils and promises. The course will also examine the influence of American criminal justice reforms and the deepening legitimacy crisis of mass incarceration on Israeli criminal justice system, and the ways Israeli criminal justice system embraced, as well as resisted and transformed American reforms in light of the specific history, culture and challenges of the Israeli context.
190.4: Basic Legal Values, Dan-Cohen, 3 units, Area II
Although everyone agrees that law promotes some values, what these values are is often unclear and controversial. This is increasingly the case the more we come to recognize cultural diversity and moral pluralism faced by the law. In this seminar we will examine a number of values that have been advanced within the liberal tradition, such as well-being, autonomy, and dignity, and consider their potential role in shaping or explaining a wide range of legal disputes. The seminar will divide into two parts. In the first, we’ll get acquainted with these values in the context of the two main strands in liberal moral theory – utilitarianism and Kantianism – and consider some general issues concerning the meaning of these values and their interrelationships. The second part will consist of student presentations on specific substantive topics in which the general issues discussed in the first part arise.
H195C: Legal Studies Honors Research and Writing Seminar, Edelman, 1 unit, Areas not applicable.
The goal of the seminar is to provide Honors students additional support as they conduct the research for and write their senior honors theses, and prepare presentations for the Spring Studies Undergraduate Research Conference. Honors students enroll in the one unit LS H195C seminar during the second semester of the Honors Program along with the four units of LS H195B.