Sociology of Law (318-DL-20)

Instructors

Austin Abernethy Stimpson Jenkins

Meeting Info

Online: TBA

Overview of class

Law is not just a set of rules that control behavior. Real law is also cultural. Law depends on institutions and organizations. Social forces shape the people who write, enforce, and fall before the law. In this course, students will learn how sociologists have attempted to make sense of law in its entirety, as something that real people do under the weight of history. In addition to outlining the subfield of the sociology of law and its intellectual context, this course will introduce students to comparative legal studies, legal consciousness and legal narratives, intersectionality and the law, the relationship between law and science, sociological jurisprudence, American civil rights law, and law as profession. Course materials will include texts on social and legal theory, empirical legal studies scholarship, journalistic accounts of trials, and primary legal sources. Students will be able to pick topics and readings based on their interests.

This course is conducted completely online. A technology fee will be added to tuition.

Foundational disciplines / distribution: social sciences. Meets requirement for course that applies perspectives on power, justice, and equity within the U.S.

Registration Requirements

This course is limited to School of Professional Studies students only. Undergraduate students in other schools at Northwestern are not permitted to enroll in this course.

Prerequisites: none

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Delineate the structure of the contemporary U.S. legal system.
Define the sociology of law and describe how it differs from other kinds of legal scholarship, including jurisprudence and doctrinal analysis.
Explain how Durkheim, Weber, and Foucault used international and historical comparisons to understand how legal systems have changed over time.
Identify the role of legal norms and concepts in everyday life and describe the roles of culture and personal narratives in legal discourse.
Describe how law both shapes, and is shaped by, cultural understandings of race, gender, class, and other social categories.
Define the co-production of law and scientific expertise and apply a co-productionist perspective to real legal disputes.
Identify examples of natural law, positivist, formalist, interpretivist, and realist legal reasoning.
Diagnose major structural causes of the U.S. legal system's failures to guarantee rights and settle disputes equitably.
Describe how the organizational and professional context of legal work shapes legal outcomes.

Class Attributes

Asynchronous:Remote class-no scheduled mtg time