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Prerequisites: One Philosophy course, or one political theory Government course, or permission of instructor.
Distributives: TMV
This course will examine the American system of criminal law from the philosophical origins and justifications of crime and punishment to the specific elements that make up criminal statutes in the US. We will examine the ways in which statutes lay down general rules of law, which leave ambiguities and uncertainties to be interpreted in court opinions. We will look at differences in how crimes are defined and punished across state systems, and discuss tensions created by the law and its underlying justifications. We will work on developing sound arguments from competing perspectives around an issue.
We will also focus on skills of practical application. Reading court cases, identifying the key facts and then summarizing them in a useful way can be difficult and a time-consuming skill to learn, but will be valuable regardless of what profession you ultimately choose to pursue. Analyzing legal cases and participating in discussion will require you to pay careful attention to a wide range of facts, carefully consider alternatives, and thoughtfully express your perspectives. Finally, we will begin the process of learning how attorneys analyze, differentiate, and argue cases based on the needs of their clients.
This course focuses on Indigenous law and legal systems, primarily from the United States but with some attention to the jurisgenerative (or law-creating) roles of Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal Peoples. For Indigenous peoples, the resurgence of traditional Indigenous laws and their accompanying legal structures serves as an important marker of indigenous self-determination and nation (re)building. At the same time, these developments challenge the long-standing hegemony of the nation-state, particularly the centrality of the state's legal system and the presumption that the state is the sole author and arbiter of law. The resurgence of Indigenous law and legal systems, in short, tests the limits of legal pluralism, the notion that two or more legal systems can co-exist peacefully in shared territories.
This course provides students with a broad overview of Roman political thought, with attention to how it has come to shape our own political landscape. Our central focus will be on how Romans explored, and struggled with, the problem of ambition. Perhaps more than any society, before or since, Romans were preoccupied with ambition, which they understood to be more than just 'desire for power.' Romans understood ambition to be an insatiable appetite for dominance, which could drive a person to insanity and precipitate unspeakable horrors, and they dealt with it accordingly – as an exceedingly dangerous passion that cannot be allowed to roam freely, lest it destroy everything in its path. But they also recognized that, when appropriately molded and shaped, ambition could prove to be a source of extraordinary political accomplishment; and furthermore, they believed the genius of their own society was (or had been) its capacity to do just that. Our study of Roman political ideas will aim to recover and explore this perspective, with a view to what it might have to offer us today.