Fall 2024/Spring 2025 LSC Emphasis
In the 2024–2025 year, the following courses make up the emphasis, along with year-long participation in the Socio-Legal Studies Workshops:
Multi- and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Law is a reading and discussion seminar. We will read a book or several articles each week, and students will come to class ready (and willing) to discuss it. We will engage with law from a substantial number of distinct disciplinary perspectives (anthropology, economics, history, literature, rhetoric, sociology, political science) which we will use in an attempt to construct our own "interdisciplinary" knowledge of law. "Interdisciplinarity" stands for the attempt to reconnect what was pulled apart in the creation of the disciplines. It generally takes one of three forms: an attempt to cultivate a perspective on a realm of study that stands outside the realm of study being examined; or an attempt to use the methods of one discipline to understand the substance of another discipline, or an attempt to draw from one or more disciplines to answer questions of law that are not answered fully by any one discipline. In this course, we will encounter interdisciplinary, disciplinary, and/or multidisciplinary approaches toward the study of law.
This seminar introduces students to the study of punishment from a sociological perspective. Our overarching aim will be to develop a critical knowledge of how social theories and sociological methods are used to analyze penal laws, policies, and practices and their cultural products and social effects. We will focus on different ways to think about and examine punishment, with an eye to how the seminar readings may be relevant to students’ own research. The course complements classic studies with the latest scholarship in the punishment and society field. While the course begins with the Durkheim-Marx-Foucault trinity, the intent is to address it critically, focusing on both its strengths and its limits, before reading recent research on gender, race, and punishment that works to broaden the scope beyond the field’s grand theories and classic texts.
The tenth cohort includes one student representing UC Irvine School of Law:
Katrina Carney
Adviser: Susan Bibler Coutin