102: Policing & Society
111: The Making of Modern Constitutionalism
170: Crime & Criminal Justice
176: 20th Century American Legal & Constitutional History
189: Feminist Jurisprudence (coming soon to the schedule)
Course Details:
LS 102: Policing & Society – Musheno
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.
Session A – MTuWTh 2-4:00pm
Area IV
LS 111: The Making of Modern Constitutionalism – Lieberman
Historical examination of the emergence of constitutionalism as an authoritative approach to the study of law and politics; coverage from the 16th to 18th centuries, concluding in discussion of the debate over ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
Session A – MTuWTh 3-5:00pm
Area II
LS 170: Crime and Criminal Justice – Perry
This course examines the scope and causes of the crime problem in America, and the uses and limits of our criminal justice system in dealing with it. The class will look at recent trends in crime and at how our crime problem compares with that of other countries. Topics include the massive expansion of the American prison system in recent years and its effect on the crime rate, critical analyses of different theories of the causes of crime, strategies for preventing and controlling crime, death penalty, gun control, white-collar crime, and crime in the family.
Session A – MTuWTh 12-2:00pm
Area IV
LS 176: 20th Century American Legal & Constitutional History – Brown
The opponents of the federal Constitution in 1787 insisted that the new government write into the Constitution limitations on the power of the federal government and a pledge that all powers not given to the federal government would be retained by the people and the states. Yet in 2007, the federal government, through Supreme Court rulings and Congressional legislation, rights of individuals and limits the ability of states to invade those rights. The ultimate irony of the Constitution is that the Bill of Rights, which was intended to limit the federal government, became the means by which federal government power expanded dramatically. We will begin this course by tracing the relationship of federalism and individual rights from the framing through the adoption of the Civil War amendments. We will then examine the constitutional settlement of the Lochner era and the dramatic 20th-century restatement of federal-state relations in 1937. We will then study the Warren Court’s creation of a new constitutional order of individual rights, and the ratification of those rights in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ending with a survey of the current battle on the Roberts Court between two different sets of constitutional values.
Session A – MTuWTh 10am-12pm
Area II
LS 189: Feminist Jurisprudence – Abrams
This course will explore the ways in which feminist theory has shaped conceptions of the law, as both an influence contributing to sex and gender inequality, and a vehicle for its amelioration. The course will examine a range of feminist legal theories, including equality, difference, dominance, intersectional, poststructural, postcolonial theories. It will ask how these theories have shaped legal interventions in areas including workplace/educational access, sexualized coercion, work/family conflict, cultural defenses, and globalized sweatshop labor. It will also consider how epistemological challenges that emerged from feminist theory in other disciplines shaped challenges to objectivist epistemology in law.
Session A – MTuWTh 10am-12pm
Area I