Terms offered: Not yet offered
This course is designed to fulfill the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. Students will learn to identity an author's point of view and main arguments; evaluate an author's credibility and the merits of hs or her argument, write a unified essay with intro, thesis statement, transitions between paragraphs, a concluding paragraph and develop an argument about an issue related to the course.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. Students will develop their skills at critical reading, writing, and analysis, and will complete a series of essays culminating in a research paper relating to law, legal actors, and legal institutions. Emphasis will be placed on the process of writing, including developing research questions, constructing an argument, and revising for content and style.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2001
The Berkeley Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Berkeley Seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester.

Terms offered: Spring 2009, Spring 2006, Fall 2001
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2012
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
We will explore how data are used in the criminal justice system by exploring the debates surrounding mass incarceration and evaluating a number of different data sources that bear on police practices, incarceration, and criminal justice reform. Students will be required to think critically about the debates regarding criminal justice in the US and to work with various public data sets to assess the extent to which these data confirm or deny specific policy narratives. Building on skills from Foundations of Data Science, students will be required to use basic data management skills working in Python: data cleaning, aggregation, merging and appending data sets, collapsing variables, summarizing findings, and presenting data visualizations.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016
Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from year to year.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This is a liberal arts course designed to introduce students to the foundational frameworks and cross-disciplinary perspectives from humanities and social sciences that distinguish legal studies as a scholarly field. It provides a comparative and historical introduction to forms, ideas, institutions, and systems of law and sociological ordering. It highlights basic theoretical problems and scholarly methods for understanding questions of law and justice.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Summer 2015 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 Second 6 Week Session
This course examines the American social institution of policing with particular emphasis on urban law enforcement. It explores the social, economic, and cultural forces that pull policing in the direction of state legal authority and power as well as those that are a counter-weight to the concentration of policing powers in the state. Special attention is given to how policing shapes and is shaped by the urban landscape, legal to cultural.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2016
An historical examination of major interpretations of law, morals and social development, with special emphasis on the social thought of the 18th and 19th centuries and including the writings of Marx, Maine, Durkheim, Weber and other contemporary figures.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This course challenges adult-centered representations of urban youth of different ethnicities, their problems, and the supposed solutions to those problems. It departs from the conceptualizations and methods used to study youth in mainstream criminology and developmental psychology. Attention is given to youth conflict, peer relations, identity building within and across ethnic groups, claims on territory, the salience of law and rights, and adaptations to adult authorities and practices.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Criminal law raises fundamental theoretical issues that have occupied philosophers over the years. In this course we will discuss a selection of articles that bring to bear such a philosophical perspective on important aspects of criminal law. Topics include justification of punishment, foundations of blame and responsibility, substantive values protected by criminal law, significance of actual harm, liability of groups and other collectivities, and virtues and limits of the rule of law.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Major perspectives in social and economic thought, e.g., natural law, natural right, laissez faire, "possessive individualism," contractualism, pluralism, and social equality as they affect contemporary discussion of "higher law," fairness, civic competence, and distributive justice.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
Analysis of the capacity of criminal law to fulfill its aims. What are the aims of criminal law? How are they assigned relative priority? What principles can be identified for evaluating the effort to control disapproved activities through criminal law?

Terms offered: Spring 2010, Fall 2008, Spring 2008
This course focuses on the history of legal thought and discourse from the late medieval period to the Enlightenment. Topics to be considered include the relationship between legal thought and intellectual developments and the relationship between political and constitutional developments and legal discourse. Although the emphasis is on England, there will be some consideration of differences between English and continental European legal thought.

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2010
This is an introduction to important aspects of the philosophical and constitutional thought of classical Athens. We will pay particular attention to accounts of the origins of the Athenian legal system; criticisms and defenses of the democracy; arguments about the nature of justice, law, and legal obligation; and the context of the Athenian way of organizing trials, taxation, and administration. Readings from Aeschylus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Lysias, Aristotle, and others.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Summer 2015 First 6 Week Session
We often hear that America is a "nation of immigrants." This representation of the U.S. does not explain why some are presumed to belong and others are not. We will examine both historical and contemporary law of immigration and citizenship to see how law has shaped national identity and the identity of immigrant communities. In addition to scholarly texts, we will read and analyze excerpts of cases and the statute that governs immigration and citizenship, the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This course examines a number of leading U.S. Supreme Court decisions in terms of what policy alternatives were available to the Court and which ones it chose. Prospective costs and benefits of these alternatives and who will pay the costs and who gets the benefits of them are considered. Among the areas considered are economic development, government regulation of business, national security, freedom of speech and discrimination. Readings are solely of Supreme Court decisions.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
This course is an introduction to the comparative study of different legal cultures and traditions including common law, civil law, socialist law, and religious law. A section of the class will be dedicated to the comparison of the colonial and post-colonial legal process in Latin America and in Africa.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course will explore the relation between property law and limits of liberty in different cultures and at different times. The course will cover theories of property law, slavery, the clash between aboriginal and European ideas of property, gender roles and property rights, common property systems, zoning, regulatory takings, and property on the internet. Readings will include legal theorists, court cases, and historical case studies.

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
The course will apply microeconomic theory analysis to legal rules and procedures. Emphasis will be given to the economic consequences of various sorts of liability rules, remedies for breach of contract and the allocation of property rights. The jurisprudential significance of the analysis will be discussed.

Terms offered: Fall 2011
We will discuss how the creation of knowledge, artistic, literary, and musical works are supported in a competitive economy especially in the digital age. We will discuss intellectual property, copyrights, trade secrets, trade marks, and geographic indications, in historical and institutional contexts. We will consider the problems of competition that arise in the digital economy, such as Google Books, the Microsoft antitrust cases, and search advertising.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
Law and Economics I is not a prerequisite for Law and Economics II. Students may take either or both courses. Government uses many mechanisms to influence the provision of goods and services. Economists and lawyers have developed a critique of these mechanisms which has prompted substantial reforms in recent years, e.g., deregulation in transportation. The course examines this critique.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2016
Contemporary moral and political philosophy has been increasingly interested in how conceptions of the self relate to various aspects of our social and political life. These issues have an important bearing on legal theory as well. Law is shaped by certain implicit assumptions about the nature of individuals and collectivities, while it also actively participates in forming the identities of persons and in structuring collective entities such as families, corporations, and municipalities. This course will explore some theoretical approaches to this reciprocal relationship between law and the different social actors that it governs.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
Scientific advances promise great increases in social good, but whether those advancements herald a better or worse world, depends on how scientific knowledge is applied. Applying scientific knowledge in the service of humanity is challenging, and requires an informed, deliberate method. Through lectures, discussions, case studies, and field research, students will gain an understanding of the international human rights framework, historical and social context for contemporary human rights violations, insights into the role of race, gender, and technology in structural inequality, opportunities to work across disciplines on real-world design challenges, and experience assessing needs and designing for specific, selected human rights apps.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
This course offers a comparative perspective on law and legal institutions. Looking comparatively helps shed light on our own system and question what is “normal” or “natural.” From what it means to be a lawyer to notions of what is “just” or “fair,” courts and dispute resolution outside the U.S. can be both very different and, at times, surprisingly familiar. After an overview of concepts and classic approaches to the study of law and society, the course will explore these differences and similarities in three Asian settings: China, Japan, and India. Topics include lawyers, illicit sex, and environmental protection, to see how each country’s history, political structure, values, and interests shape how legal issues are defined and play out

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course provides an overview of international human rights, including the field's historical and theoretical foundations; the jurisprudence of international human rights; empirical insights from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, and anthropology; and emerging trends in human rights practice.

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Fall 2012, Fall 2011
How has the law constructed and deconstructed "family" relationships? What are the common law, statutory, and constitutional principles that affect the formation, regulation, and dissolution of families? How do these principles, as well as diverse cultural and social values, guide the state in determining marriage, family, and child welfare policies?

Terms offered: Summer 2011 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2007 Second 6 Week Session
Law now plays a prominent role in medicine and science. Recent years have witnessed a major expansion of law's involvement. Law (statutory and court-made) articulates and interprets norms of conduct. This course will examine a number of topics where law and medicine intersect involving many of our most fundamental values including body, life, death, religion, reproduction, sexuality, and family. In each area, we will include both traditional issues, like "right to die" and more current disputes such as physician assisted suicide.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 First 6 Week Session
This course will evaluate and assess modern theories of international law. We will examine the work of legal scholars and look to political science and economics to see how these disciplines inform the study of international law. We will also examine a host of fundamental questions in international law, including, for example, why states enter into international agreements, why states comply with international law, and what kind of state conduct is likely to be influenced by international law.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
Focusing on developing countries, this course considers the relationship between legal institutions and rules--including informal and traditional ones--and development--defined by different actors by economic growth, education, health, or a wide spectrum of freedoms. It examines efforts by national leaders, international organizations, foreign aid agencies, and NGOs to "reform" law to promote development, along with the resistance and unplanned consequences that often ensue.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
This course focuses on the legal regulation of sexuality, and the social and historical norms and frameworks that affect its intersection with sex, gender, race, disability, and class. We will critically examine how the law shapes sexuality and how sexuality shapes the law. Our subject matter is mostly constitutional, covering sexuality’s intersection with privacy, freedom of expression, gender identity and expression, equal protection, reproduction, kinship, and family formation, among other subjects. We will study case law, legal articles, and other texts (including visual works) that critically engage issues of sexuality, citizenship, nationhood, religion, and the public and private spheres domestically and internationally.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017, Spring 2016
This course surveys the development of Western penal practices, institutions, and ideas (what David Garland calls "penality") from the eighteenth-century period to the present. Our primary focus will be on penal practices and discourses in the United States in the early 21st century. In particular we will examine the extraordinary growth of US penal sanctions in the last quarter century and the sources and consequences of what some have called "mass imprisonment."

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
The course examines concepts that form the basis of the Chinese legal system, traditional theories and institutions of pre-1911 society, and the expression and rejection of the traditional concepts in the laws of the Nationalist period and the People's Republic.

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Fall 2013
This course advances the claim that the criminal justice system is both a product and a powerful engine of racial hierarchy in American society, and that strategies of restorative justice, which have recently garnered attention in settings from prisons to middle schools, hold out promise as practices of racial justice. We explore this thesis by examining the ways in which criminal justice systems shape the emotions and social relations of victims, offenders, and members of the larger community.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course examines the premises, doctrine, and operational behavior of juvenile courts, particularly in relation to the commission of seriously anti-social acts by mid-adolescents. Topics include the history of theories of delinquency; the jurisprudence of delinquency; the incidence and severity of delinquency; police response to juvenile offenders; the processes of juvenile courts and youth corrections; and reforms or alternatives to the juvenile court system.

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Fall 2013, Spring 2013
This course examines recent American legal and social history with respect to reproductive and sexual behavior. We will consider two theoretical aspects of the problem: first, theories of how law regulates social behavior and second, more general theories about how reproduction is socially regulated. Armed with these theoretical perspectives, the course will then examine closely a number of legal/social conflicts, including sterilization, abortion and contraception.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2014
Introduction to the etiology of crime and criminal justice administration. What is crime? What are the main features and problems of the process by which suspected criminals are apprehended, tried, sentenced, punished? Past and current trends and policy issues will be discussed.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2011
Most contemporary legal systems derive from one or the other of the two legal orders that developed in continental Europe and England over the course of the centuries. This course introduces students to some of the main features of the continental European or civil law tradition, a tradition that has its origins in Roman law. We will look at the English common law tradition, which began to diverge from the law of continental Europe in the middle ages, and acquired its own distinctive character.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
This is an intro to the origins, development, and expansion of European settlement on the North American mainland. We will concentrate on the impulses – commercial, ideological, and racial – that drove European colonizing; the migrations (voluntary and forced) that sustained it; and the political and legal “technologies” that supplied it with definition, explanation, and institutional capacity. We will pay attention to themes of sovereignty, civic identity, race, and “manifest destiny” and will discuss how law provided both the language and technical capacity to transform territory into property, people into slaves, and the land’s indigenous inhabitants into “others” who existed “outside” the civic order of the American Republic.

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course will provide an introduction to constitutional law using Israel as a case study. Topics include: Constitutionalism and judicial review, state neutrality and self-determination, minority rights, state and religion, Human Rights Law, the concept of “defensive democracy" and ban of non-democratic political parties, legal aspects of the fight on terror, freedom of expression, equality and anti-discrimination, social rights, and constitutional limitations on privatization.

Terms offered: Summer 2015 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2013
Development of American law and the constitutional system in the 20th century. Topics include Progressive Era Regulatory policy, criminal justice and relations, freedom of speech and press, New Deal legal innovations, modern tort liability, environmental regulation, judicial reform, and federalism.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
Overview of American legal and constitutional history from colonial times to the present. Topics include colonial legal institutions, early constitutional history, history of the common law, business regulation, race and the law, history of the legal profession, and the modern constitutional order.

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Spring 2010, Spring 2009
This course will provide advanced reading and independent research in the history of American law. Preference may be given to students who have taken 177.

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2012
An examination of constitutional decision-making in a number of countries based on selected high court opinions.

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2012
Implicit bias, automatic or unconscious stereotyping, and prejudice that guides our perception of and behavior toward social groups, is a fast growing area of law and psychology. Students will look at research in substantive areas of employment discrimination, criminal law, and questions regarding communications, voting, health care, immigration, property, and whether research findings showing unconscious gender, racial, and other biases can be used as courtroom evidence to prove discrimination.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2013, Spring 2012
This course will examine the implications of cognitive, social, and clinical psychology for legal theory, policies, and practices. The course will analyze the psychological aspects of intent, responsibility, deterrence, retribution, and morality. We will examine applications of psychology to evidence law (e.g. witness testimony, psychiatric diagnosis, and prediction), procedure (e.g. trial conduct, jury selection), and topics in criminal tort and family law.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2016
This course examines the theory and practice of legal institutions in performing several major functions of law: allocating authority, defining relationships, resolving conflict, adapting to social change, and fostering social solidarity. In doing so, it will assess the nature and limits of law as well as consider alternative perspectives on social control and social change.

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013
Course will examine concepts of race and culture, various understandings of and approaches to diversity found in the law, and the role of sociocultural structures in shaping the operation of antidiscrimination law and social policy. Topics include: psychology of desegregation, colorblindness and equal protection, affirmative action, stereotyping, sexism in the workplace, prejudice toward immigrants, social class and poverty.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course explores major issues and debates in the sociology of law. Topics include theoretical perspectives on the relationship between law and society, theories of why people obey (and disobey) the law, the relationship between law and social norms, the "law in action" in litigation and dispute resolution, the roles of lawyers, judges, and juries in the legal system and in society, and the role of law in social change. The course will examine these issues from an empirical perspective.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, this course embraces the longue duree of critical prison studies, questioning the shadows of normality that cloak mass incarceration both across the globe and, more particularly, in the contemporary United States. This course thus explores a series of visceral, unsettling juxtapositions: "freedom" and "slavery"; "citizenship" and "subjugation"; "marginalization" and "inclusion", in each case explicating the ways that story making, political demagoguery, and racial, class, and sexual inequalities have wrought an untenable social condition.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, this course embraces the longue duree of critical prison studies, questioning the shadows of normality that cloak mass incarceration both across the globe and, more particularly, in the contemporary United States. This course thus explores a series of visceral, unsettling juxtapositions: "freedom" and "slavery"; "citizenship" and "subjugation"; "marginalization" and "inclusion", in each case explicating the ways that story making, political demagoguery, and racial, class, and sexual inequalities have wrought an untenable social condition.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Summer 2004 10 Week Session
Dimensions of diversity at the heart of this course are perceptions of commonality and attributions of difference defined by race and immigration. Emphasis is given to contemporary law and politics in the U.S., but with an eye toward how the law and politics of the here and now is rooted in history. "Race" is broadly defined by concepts of identity, immigration, citizenship, class, ethnicity, and gender. "Politics" is broadly defined both by a center stage of elite actors in government and the laws and policies they make and implement, and by the relevant contexts and audiences that define that stage, inclusive of elections, civic engagement, protests, political talk, and organizational behavior.

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Summer 2013 First 6 Week Session
This course will explore the ways in which feminist theory has shaped conceptions of the law, as well as examine a range of feminist legal theories, including equality, difference, dominance, intersectional, poststructural, postcolonial theories. It will ask how these theories have shaped legal interventions in areas including workplace/educational access, sexualized coercion, work/family conflict, "cultural" defenses, and globalized sweatshop labor.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Advanced study in law and society with specific topics to be announced.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course provides Legal Studies honors students with the opportunity to learn about the conduct of legal studies research, how to write an honors thesis proposal, and prepare for writing an honors thesis in the spring.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
Study of an advanced topic under the supervision of a faculty member leading to the completion of a senior honors thesis.

Terms offered: Spring 2017
The goal of the seminar is to provide students additional support as they conduct the research for and write their senior honors theses, and prepare presentations for the Spring Studies Undergraduate Research Conference. Students enroll in the one unit LEGALST H195C seminar during the second semester of the Honors Program along with the four units of LEGALST H195B.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from year to year.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
Enrollment restrictions apply. Consult the Legal Studies department for more information.