SOC 364 - Law and Society

This course is intended as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over legality and illegality, legal pluralism, human rights, access to justice, legal consciousness, law and social inequality, law and social control, and legal mobilization, we focus on social and cultural dimensions of the law through varied historical and geographical contexts. Among the specific problems we cover are: With what concepts and methods can we explain the affinities between law and society? What are the sources, workings, and consequences of the law’s legitimacy? How does the law reinforce or mitigate class, gender, and race-based inequalities? Who mobilizes the law-how and with what results? In grappling with these questions, we examine the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): SOC 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.