Legal Studies

This course examines the sociological approaches to the systematic analysis of law, its operation, and its significance in society. It studies law as a major social phenomenon related to other aspects of society and explores its pervasive influence on human behavior and society. Topics include the sociology of law; the justification of law; major foundational works on law and society; the social basis of law, including folkways and mores, law and culture, legal pluralism, living law and book law, traditional or customary law and modern law, approaches to the study of law, and legal positivism; the consensus perspective or law as an integrative mechanism; the conflict perspective or law, power, and ideological control; law as an instrument of social change; the acceptance and legitimacy of law; the professional guardians of law; judges, courts, and disputes; and the enforcement and invocation of law.

This course provides an overview of the history of law in Europe. The course sketches the history of a common civilization, to which people contributed coming from different and faraway lands, cities, kingdoms, and towns. A special focus is on the sources of law: legislation, legal doctrine, and legal practice. The relevance of each of these sources varied over time. In order to shed light on the common features throughout the history of Europe, the course focuses on a selection of the institutions of private and public law which are most representative of each epoch and each country. A special emphasis is on the correlation between the laws and the role played by professional jurists. All topics in the course are dealt with particular attention to the exchange of normative bodies, legislations, doctrines, judicial decisions, and customs within Europe, including English Common Law. Overall, the course introduces students to the complexities of European legal history through in-depth analysis of the sources of the law, from the middle ages to the present time. The course recommends students have background knowledge with the fundamentals of Private Law and Public Law.

This course offers an overview of how American legal institutions defined and enforced public rules based on race and racial categories. It begins with a discussion of the American constitution, then proceeds to the law of slavery, Native American removal, restrictions against Chinese and Asian immigrants, and race-based segregation. The course delves into the American Civil Rights Movement, followed by studies of desegregation and notions of “colorblindness.”   

This course examines the role played by international law during European colonization and after the decolonization movement of the 1950s and 1960s (exploitation colonies) and the 1980s and 1990s (settlement colonies). The first part of the course shows how traditional international law was a colonialist and racist international law that legalized the entire colonial movement. The second part looks at the ambivalent role of contemporary international law: on the one hand, it is used to repair colonial history; on the other hand, it helps to perpetuate a regime of domination and contemporary neo-colonialism.

Full course description

This course aims to introduce students to the general content of modern law and to the discipline of legal reasoning. These two go together. Law cannot be fully understood in abstraction of the particular way that lawyers, judges and other expert operators of the legal system look at it. Coming  out of the course, students should be able to understand what law is and how it is different from (and similar to) morality, identify the main branches of Law and their basic institutions, recognize and differentiate the principal values underlying those branches and understand the nature of legal  reasoning and be able to apply it to legal problems. 

It is often assumed that to study law means essentially to study the law of a particular jurisdiction. A Dutch lawyer studies Dutch law and a German lawyer studies German law, and there is little that they share beyond the name of their chosen profession. This picture is misleading. Despite the fact that every country establishes its own legal system, there is much less diversity in law than what one would imagine. A key theme of this course is that law arises naturally as a solution to various social problems and, to the extent that human societies face the same problems, similar responses appear almost everywhere. Even though details may vary, contract, property, inheritance, marriage, constitutions and crimes exist in almost all modern societies. Instead of focusing on specific sets of rules like the Dutch Civil Code, or the French Criminal Code, this course focuses on these widely shared problems and widely shared institutional responses. 

With regards to legal reasoning, the course asks students to create a tax, which will help them understand how law can be used as a policy tool for regulatory and redistributive purposes. In this connection, the course will also include a “workshop” where students will be asked to go through a high profile judgment and identify the logical moves taken by a court to justify its decision.

Course objectives

• To introduce students to the basic areas of law (contracts, property, torts, criminal law, international law etc.). 

• To familiarize students with the methods of legal reasoning. 

• To illustrate to students how law arises in response to social problem and how it is different from other domains such as politics and morality. 

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary research field of Transitional Justice which may include both judicial and non-non-judicial mechanisms, with different levels of international involvement and individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting, and dismissals. The course explores the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, the aftermath of colonialism in Africa and Indonesia, the aftermath of communism, truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and different types of retributive justice in dealing with the Rwandan genocide. This course looks at the effectiveness of the Transitional Justice mechanisms, its measure of effectiveness on a state level, and statistical outcomes.