Course Description
Introduces students to the ways that lawyers, historians, social scientists, and others evaluate the law’s relationship to justice, the state, and democracy, and help them understand how those relationships have shaped and been shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political ideas and institutions.
Athena Title
Law, Justice, and the State
Semester Course Offered
Offered spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
- Upon completion of this class, students will be able to demonstrate an ability to read, understand, and interpret legal texts like statutes, cases, and the United States Constitution.
- Upon completion of this class, students will be able to compare the disciplinary approaches taken to the United States legal system by lawyers, the social sciences, and the humanities, including Political Science, Sociology, History, and Philosophy.
- Upon completion of this class, students will be able to use those various approaches to develop, articulate, and defend their own position on how American legal principles and institutions relate to justice, democracy, and important cultural, social, and economic institutions.
- Upon completion of this class, students will be able to outline formal and informal processes that can produce changes to foundational legal rules and institutions. Identify areas of potential change in those institutions and rules, and evaluate those potential changes.
Topical Outline
- Why do and should we obey the law? Philosophical and Sociological approaches to legal obligation and justice
- How do we identify the law? Legal and Political Science approaches to legal interpretation
- How does society change law? And vice versa? Historical and Sociological approaches to legal change
- Law in politics, and politics in law. Legal and Political Science understandings of judicial politics and the relationship of law to democracy
- American Law in a global context
