LAPA's course offerings meet a growing demand for law-related teaching at Princeton. LAPA-sponsored courses have enriched Princeton's curriculum with classes that address a wide range of topics and target several different segments of the student body. In previous semesters, offerings have included freshman seminars on such topics as "The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy," "Who Owns the Past?" and "Multiculturalism and Constitutional Justice;" an English Department graduate seminar entitled "Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies: Interpretation, Literature, and the Law"; a Politics Department undergraduate seminar on "Citizenship" and a Woodrow Wilson School course on "Regulation of the Telecommunications Industry."

Opportunities to learn about legal processes, institutions, and history are widespread across many campus departments. Included below are abbreviated descriptions of some of the law-related graduate courses (Spring '08,Fall '07), undergraduate courses (Spring '08, Fall '07) and freshman seminars (Spring '08,Fall '07) that are offered during the 2007-2008 academic year. Not all courses listed here have been sponsored by LAPA, but they are included on this page in order to publicize cross-disciplinary opportunities to interested students. For more information on these and other current courses, please consult the Office of the Registrar's Course Schedule. See also the law-related course offerings from previous years (2006—2007).

Spring 2008

Graduate Courses

EAS 592: The Politics of Deviancy, Punishment, and Social Order in East Asia

Professor: David R. Leheny

This is an interdisciplinary research seminar designed to contextualize recent intellectual contributions on law, social order, and deviancy in East Asia. By drawing on political and social theories regarding marginalization, state rationality, and the public construction of justice, we will consider how the historical development of local prosecutorial and penal cultures reflects the spread of rationalized state institutions and of political and civil rights, even as these are shaped by local political demands. We will also examine how changing debates about crime and deviancy reinforce or challenge patterns of power. Open to graduate students only.

NES 555: Themes in Islamic Law and Jurisprudence

Professor: Hossein Modarressi

Selected topics in Islamic law and jurisprudence. The topics vary from year to year, but the course normally includes reading of fatwas and selected Islamic legal texts in Arabic. Reading knowledge of Arabic is required. Course not open to freshmen.

NES 556: Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory

Professor: Aron Zysow

This course offers a systematic introduction to the key terms and concepts of classical Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) through the close reading and analysis of several short elementary works as well as more advanced selection. No previous study of Islamic law is required.

PHI 523: Problems of Philosophy: Philosophy of Law

Professor: John B. Gardner

This class will consider two main problems in the general theory of law. The first problem is the problem about the nature of law. What is law? How does it differ from neighboring or related things such as coercion, convention, morality, and game-playing? The second problem is the problem about law's moral obligatoriness. Do we have (always, typically or sometimes) a moral obligation to obey the law? And when, if at all, is such an obligation defeated by competing considerations so as to warrant conscientious objection, civil disobedience, or even revolution? The approach will be to study one article or chapter in detail for each meeting. Open to graduate students only.

POL 563/PHI 526: Philosophy of Law

Professor: Robert P. George

A systematic study of the salient features of legal systems, standards of legal reasoning, and the relation between law and morals. Open to graduate students only.

WWS 516B: Topics in Law & Public Policy: Legacies of Nuremberg: Universal Human Rights in Europe

Professor: Aidan O'Neill

The class will give students an understanding of the genesis and development of human rights culture in Europe following the end of the World War II. The class will be in two parts. The first part will deal with the historical, cultural, legal and political context within which the European Convention on Human Rights falls to be placed. The second part will be concerned with the looking at some of the substantive provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, as interpreted in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights over the past 50 years. Open to graduate students only.

WWS 545/POL 555: International Legal Order

Professor: Jeffrey L. Dunoff

A critical examination of the appropriate roles for international law and institutions in the contemporary world. The course examines a variety of systemic issues, such as the sources and scope of international law, and the role of courts in international relations, through examination of specific topic areas, including human rights, international trade and the use of force. Open to graduate students only.

WWS 586D: Topics in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy: Global Environmental Governance

Professor: Michael Oppenheimer

Examines international law and governance in the context of environmental problems. Considers the need for regulation under conditions of scientific uncertainty in issues such as climate change, bovine growth hormones, GMOs, fisheries management, biodiversity conservation, ozone depletion. Explores the efficacy of diverse regulatory approaches, mechanisms for scientific advice to policymakers and participation by business firms, NGOs. Considers intersections between environmental regulation (both domestic and international) with trade, investment, and multilateral development, aid programs.

Spring 2008

Undergraduate Courses

AAS 351: Law, Social Policy, and African American Women

Professor: Imani Perry

Journeying from enslavement and Jim Crow to the post-civil rights era, this course will learn how law and social policy have shaped, constrained, and been resisted by black women's experience and thought. Using a wide breadth of materials including legal scholarship, social science research, visual arts, and literature, we will also develop an understanding of how property, the body, and the structure and interpretation of domestic relations have been frameworks through which black female subjectivity in the United States was and is mediated.

AMS 322/JDS 322: American Legal Theory and Jewish Law

Professor: Suzanne L. Stone

This course investigates the relationship between "Torah and Constitution." Early political and legal philosophers often drew on the Bible to develop their theories. More recently, American legal and political theorists have turned to the rabbinic tradition as an alternative model for law. Do these two systems of law share common principles, values, or methods of interpretation? The course will look at a variety of schools of legal thought, including various theories of constitutional law, common law, and literary interpretation, feminist jurisprudence, naturalism, positivism, and legal realism. Course not open to freshmen.

ANT 322: Law and Love: An Anthropology of Social Forces

Professor: Carol J. Greenhouse

Examining "law" and "love" as social forces gives us a way to examine some key assumptions behind such everyday distinctions as altruism/self-interest, public/private, rules/norms, regulation and free market, kinship and citizenship, friend and foe. In the seminar, we untangle these binaries by exploring various settings -- of family, community, law and business -- where they have been put into practice as organizing principles, and thus into contention. We also follow them beyond the West into post-colonial and post-socialist environments, so as to further hone our comparative and interpretive questions. Open to freshmen and sophomores only.

HIS 480/POL 425: Law, State, and Social Change, 1860s-1950s

Professor: Peter L. Lindseth

Industrialization, urbanization, mass migration, economic depression, and total war--these all combined to make the 1860s-1950s a century of social upheaval. This course compares legal responses in four states (Britain, France, Germany, and the US). We will examine different versions of representative democracy; suffrage reform and the democratization of politics; and how law coped with administrative power, how social welfare policy responded to economic dislocations, and how constitutions were contested and transformed. In all four states, a new "public law" emerged, and we will trace its development through these turbulent times. Not open to freshmen.

PHI 384: Philosophy of Law

Professor: Gideon A. Rosen

Conceptual and moral problems in the foundations of law. Topics may include: morality and criminal justice; the justification of punishment; moral and economic problems in private law (torts and contracts); fundamental rights and constitutional interpretation. Prerequisite: One course in philosophy or permission of instructor.

POL 314: American Constitutional Development

Professor: Keith E. Whittington

A survey of the development of American constitutionalism, considered historically as the product of legal, political and intellectual currents and crises. Coverage includes the Founding, the Marshall and Taney eras, the slavery crisis, the rise of corporate capitalism, the emergence of the modern state, the New Deal crisis, and new forms of rights and liberties. Topics include the growth of Supreme Court power, the Court's relation to the states and the other federal branches, and the influence on constitutional understandings of economic developments, reform movements, wars, party competition, and legal and political thought.

POL 317: Discrimination and the Law

Professor: Beth K. Jamieson

Can the law be used to remedy instances of discrimination? Should state power be used to address these distinctions? We will briefly consider the genesis of modern antidiscrimination doctrine, and we will discuss the propriety of extending race-based protections to other forms of bias. We will consider disputes related to: immigration regulations and rights of non-citizens; legal regulation of cultural traditions and practices; sexuality and legal status; interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act; poverty and the possibility of justice; and gendered politics and the administration of family and employment law.

POL 379: Intelligence, National Security and the Constitutional Democracy

Professor: Diane C. Snyder

This course treats intelligence and constitutional issues essential to evaluate controversies in national security and civil liberties in a democracy. Can we implement effective security and not adversely impact our constitutional rights? Course not open to freshmen.

SOC 224/CHV 224: The Sociology of Law

Professor: Kim Lane Scheppele

Sociology has always been engaged in the study of law and, in this course, we will examine law with the tools of sociology. In Segment I, The Building Blocks of Social Life, we will explore the ways in which law provides a crucial basis for social organization at the micro-, mid-level, and macro- levels of society. We will also explore the relationship between legal norms and the moral commitments of societies and social elites. In Segment II: The Legal Organization of Social Sectors, the course takes up the legal construction of race, gender, and class, and explores the legal basis for the creation of crime, money, citizenship and terrorism.

WWS 309/SOC 313: Media and Public Policy

Professor:Paul E. Starr

Introduction to communications policy and law, covering such topics as freedom of the press and the development of journalism; intellectual property; regulation of telecommunications, broadcasting, and cable; and policy challenges raised by the Internet and the globalization of the media. Course not open to freshmen.

WWS 473: Special Topics in Public Affairs: Federalism and the Making of American Corporate Law

Professor: Robert B. Ahdieh

This class will explore the constitutional and political nature of American corporate law. Challenging our conventional ideas of legal development, corporate law arises out of a competition among states. It is a "product" to be bought and sold. As the paradigmatic case of such regulatory competition, corporate law holds important lessons for environmental law, antitrust law, family law, and other areas in which calls for federalism are growing. How are we to understand the "market" of federalism? What is for sale? Who is buying and selling? And who benefits from it? What, finally, are the necessary preconditions to an efficient market in law? Open to juniors and seniors only.

WWS 489: Special Topics in Public Affairs: International Protection of Human Rights

Professors: Martin S. Flaherty and Deborah N. Pearlstein

Seminar examines issues surrounding the enforcement of human rights laws in the United States and abroad. We first consider the nature of international law and the revolutionary emergence of modern human rights. We then survey of the substantive content of international human rights law, and the international mechanisms for its enforcement. The balance of the course focuses on the U.S., including an examination of the status of international and foreign law in the U.S. courts non-judicial enforcement mechanisms. Open to juniors and seniors only.

Spring 2008

Freshman Seminars

FRS 148: Literature and the Law: The Case of the Trial

Professor: Richard Bennett

When faced with conflict, individuals and institutions frequently turn to the law courts for resolution. Whether the dispute concerns who has committed a particular crime or what public schools should be allowed to teach young people about the origins of humankind; our society tends to look to the courts to decide many of its most important questions. Given this context, it is no surprise that works of literature often draw on legal conflicts for their themes and action. This seminar will examine these discussions between literature and the law through the lens of the trial.

Fall 2007

Graduate Courses

NES 555: Themes in Islamic Law and Jurisprudence

Professor: Hossein Modarressi

Selected topics in Islamic law and jurisprudence. The topics vary from year to year, but the course normally includes the reading of fatwas and selected Islamic legal texts in Arabic.

POL 561: Constitutional Theory

Professor: Keith E. Whittington

The specific focus of the course varies from year to year, but the principal concerns revolve around questions of what a constitutional democracy is, why a people should want to live in such a polity, and how political actors can create, maintain, and change such systems.

REL 510: Special Topics in the Study of Religion: Political Theology

Professor: Leora F. Batnitzky

This course considers the notion of "political theology" as it has emerged in twentieth-century religious and political thought, especially in the Continental European tradition. We will focus particularly on constructions of concepts of "politics," "religion," and "law." It is open to graduate students; undergraduates must receive permission from Professor.

WWS 516A / SOC 518: Topics in Law and Public Policy: The Rule of Law

Professor: Kim Lane Scheppele

The course considers the role of law in government. When is a state constrained by law and when may it legitimately change/ignore the law? The course will use a range of materials from fiction to court cases, legal theory to political history. It is open only to graduate students.

WWS 555B: Topics in International Relations: International Justice

Professor: Gary J. Bass

The course asks if international law can help to moderate or prevent war, why states sometimes pursue the prosecution of war criminals, and how law shapes and is shaped by international politics. It is open only to graduate students.
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Fall 2007

Undergraduate Courses

AAS 477 / HIS 477: The Civil Rights Movement

Professor: Joshua B. Guild

This course examines the evolution of African American political mobilization from 1945 to 1975. It explores the various ways that African Americans articulated their political demands and affirmed their citizenship, including the use of law as a tool for political action.

ANT 330: The Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Professor: Lawrence Rosen

The course considers whether there is a fundamental right to cultural integrity and the historical, legal, and ethical implications posed by the relations between modern states and their indigenous populations.

ECO 324: Law and Economics

Professor: Thomas C. Leonard

An introduction to the economics of law. Application of price theory and welfare analysis to problems and actual cases in the common law - property, contracts, torts - and to criminal and constitutional law. ECO 100 is a prerequisite for this course, and it is not open to freshmen.

ENG 305: The Medieval Period

Professor: Kathleen M. Davis

Law and Literature to 1500: Law, like literature, relies upon the power of language, a written tradition (or precedent), rhetorical persuasion, and a system of representation. This course examines the interrelation of law and literature as attested in medieval English texts. No familiarity with Middle English required.

HIS 427: The Politics of National Security Since World War II

Professor: Julian E. Zelizer

The politics of national security have played a crucial role in shaping contemporary American history. This course focuses on five inter-related themes: 1) how democrats lost their reputation for being the party that was strong on defense; 2) the political impact of Vietnam; 3) the rise of the conservative movements, and the problems that conservatives encountered after gaining power; 4) the shift from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism; and 5) how changes in the political process influenced public debates over national security. Course is open to juniors and seniors.

NES 345: Introduction to Islamic Law

Professor: Hossein Modarressi

A survey of the history of Islamic law and its developments, and the attempts of the Muslim jurists to come to term with the challenges of modern times. It will focus on issues that have the greatest relevance to the modern era. Course not open to freshmen.

NES 528: Readings in Modernist Islamic Law

Professor: Staff

This course traces the development of modernist Sunni law. The readings will cover both legal theory (usul al- fiqh) and substantive law, including such areas as the rights of women and Islamic finance.

POL 315: Constitutional Interpretation

Professor: Robert P. George

What is the Constitution? Who are its authoritative interpreters? How should they go about the task of interpretation? Course is not open to freshmen.

POL 320: Judicial Politics

Professor: Charles M. Cameron

This course provides an introduction to the political science of law and courts. Some topics that are typically covered include: bargaining and decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court; political use of litigation by activists, firms, and interest groups; social and economic impact of courts.
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Fall 2007

Freshman Seminars

FRS 109: Religion, Law, and Society

Professor: Marci Hamilton

This freshman seminar will explore the development of the constitutional law of religion through the lens of diversity. While it can be tempting to treat the early American era as though there was a single religion, Protestant Christianity, diversity of religion has been a constant since the founding. This diversity has posed challenges for government and religions since the inception of the United States. This is a Paul L. Miller '41 Freshman Seminar in Human Values. It is open to freshmen only.

FRS 113: The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy

Professor: Christopher L. Eisgruber, Former LAPA Director

Why should unelected judges be able to overrule elected legislatures? To what extent should judges draw upon their own, personal moral judgments when construing the Constitution? How should we conceive of the relationship between the Supreme Court and other political institutions? This course is a Freshman Seminar that is sponsored by LAPA and UCHV. It is open to freshmen only.

FRS 173: The Rest of the Story: The Six O'Clock News, National Security, Intelligence, and You

Professor: Diane Snyder

This seminar will familiarize the student with the intelligence, national security, and constitutional background essential to discuss and evaluate the controversies regarding the potentially irresolvable trade-off between national security and civil liberties. Can we implement effective homeland security and not adversely impact our constitutional rights? What is the "correct" relationship between intelligence and law enforcement? Does technology threaten or protect our constitutional democracy? This is a L. Richardson Preyer '41 Freshman Seminar in Public Service.
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Courses From Previous Years

To learn more about the kinds of courses LAPA faculty associates and fellows have taught, see LAPA's course archive pages. You can view 2006-2007 courses here.

Note to Faculty: If you would like your course included, removed, or if you would prefer a different wording of the abbreviated description for your course, please contact Sara Nephew Hassani at snephew@princeton.edu.