2026 Summer Schedule
A - First Six-Week Session May 26 July 2
B - Ten-Week Session June 8 August 14
C - Eight-Week Session June 22 August 14
D - Second Six-Week Session July 6 August 14
E - Three-Week Session July 27 August 14
F - Three-Week Session July 6 July 24
12W - Twelve-Week Session May 26 August 14
Quick List of courses:
Session A: 100, 138, 177, 184
Session D: 103, 132AC, 150, 157, 160, 162AC
Session A-Six Weeks: May 26 - July 2
100: Foundations of Legal Studies, Naomi Yitref, 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.
***Canceled***126: Responsible AI, Law, Ethics & Society, Maor Schwartz, 4 units, Area III or Area IV ONLINE COURSE
The deployment of Artificial Intelligence systems in multiple domains of society raises fundamental challenges and concerns, such as accountability, liability, fairness, transparency and privacy. The dynamic nature of AI systems requires a new set of skills informed by ethics, law, and policy to be applied throughout the life cycle of such systems: design, development and deployment. Tackling these challenges calls for an interdisciplinary approach: deconstructing
these issues by discipline and reconstructing with an integrated mindset, principles and practices. This course aims to do so by bringing together students into teams that work together on joint tasks in class sessions, where each of the classes will be devoted to a distinct legal or ethical question relating to AI. The sessions will include lectures, discussions, group work and guest lecture. The class is designed to allow for experiential learning experiences: a substantial portion of class time you'll be spending in working on real-world legal challenges in a case-study format. ***Canceled***
138: The Supreme Court & Public Policy, Kyle Deland, 4 units, Core (SS) or Area IV or V ONLINE COURSE
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.
177: American Legal & Constitutional History, Helen Jennings, 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.
184: Sociology of Law, Nandina Babic, 4 units, Core (SS) or Area IV
This introductory course explores major issues and debates in the sociology of law. Topics include theoretical perspectives on the relationship between law and society, theories of why people obey (and disobey) the law, the relationship between law and social norms, the “law in action” in litigation and dispute resolution, the roles of lawyers, judges, and juries in the legal system and in society, and the role of law in social change. The course will examine these issues from an empirical perspective.
Session D-Six Weeks: July 6 - August 14
103: Theories of Law and Society, Rahel Fischer, 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.
132AC: Immigration and Citizenship, Sharaban Zaman, 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.
150 - Intimate Partner Violence, Mallika Kaur, 4 units, Area I or IV ONLINE COURSE
This course will investigate the phenomenon of intimate partner violence (also known as family violence, or domestic violence), by studying empirical evidence; theories of violence; and the disparate impacts on different communities. Through a trauma-centered and intersectional approach, students will be positioned to assess and analyze the responses by our legal system to this persistent and prevalent social problem.
157: International Relations & International Law, Daimeon Shanks-Dumont, 4 units, Area IV or V
This course will evaluate and assess modern theories of international law. We will examine the work of legal scholars and look to political science and economics to see how these disciplines inform the study of international law. We will also examine a host of fundamental questions in international law, including, for example, why states enter into international agreements, why states comply with international law, and what kind of state conduct is likely to be influenced by international law.
160: Punishment, Culture & Society, 4 units, Alessandro De Giorgi, Core 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.
162AC – Restorative Justice, Julie Shackford-Bradley, 4 units, Area IV
This course will examine the theory and practice of restorative justice, with an emphasis on the ways that criminal justice systems implicate the emotions and the social integration of both victims and offenders. The course will begin with a critical examination of the current focus of the criminal justice system on retribution and incarceration. It will explore the racially disproportionate effects of this system, a product both of governmental failures to recognize the continuing economic, social and psychological effects of slavery and Jim Crow, and law’s failure to look beyond a narrow, individually-oriented notion of discrimination. The course will also interrogate the ways that existing approaches function – at times, purposefully – to foster vengeance and contempt toward offenders as a social category, complicating the process of re-entry and reintegration.