Legal Studies

This course develops a multi-disciplinary understanding of drugs in the UK and elsewhere by enabling students to apply sociological, criminological, historical, psychological and cultural perspectives to the study of drug use, and policy responses to this "social problem."  Students seek to understand why people take and sell drugs, how drug use is understood within societies, and how societies respond.  

This multidisciplinary course considers equality, discrimination, affirmative action, and multiculturalism within the specific context of the U.S. experience. This experience is characterized by three structural features that Alexis de Tocqueville famously identified: the passion for equality, the salience of racial divisions, and the judicialization of politics. Elaborating upon those intuitions, the course relies extensively on history (that of ethno-racial and religious minorities since the early nineteenth century), law (through a thorough analysis of some of the key Supreme Court decisions in this area), political science (through the study of the emergence, development, and partial decline of race-conscious policies such as affirmative action and the redistricting designed to increase the number of Black and Hispanic elected representatives), and political philosophy (by discussing theories of social justice and equality, notably those of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Michael Walzer).

This course examines the various human rights responses under international law to mass atrocities committed in communities around the world (a field known as transitional justice); the development of transitional justice and how it operates within the broader peace-building field; the historical development of transitional justice, the various justice processes that may be employed, and how they operate in theory as well as practice; societies in transition in contemporary settings and the applicable laws and legal processes.