2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

SOCI 230 Law and Society
Cross-listed with LAWP 290-01. This course is designed as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over law in everyday life, law and social inequality, and the politics of law, we will focus on the law's social, cultural, and political dimensions. Most notably, this course is organized around three major themes. The first topic concerns the theories and methods scholars deploy to account for the affinities between law and social life. We will consider how legal pronouncements and institutions shape and are shaped by our social norms, values, and relationships through the concepts of, among others, "legality," "legal consciousness," and "legal pluralism." The second part deals with the gap between the law on the books and the law in action. We will discuss when and how the law reinforces class, gender, and race-based inequalities despite its ever-present promise of justice. The final section examines the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change by calling attention to politics within and through the law. Thus, we will put as much emphasis on the law's ideological underpinnings as on how people resort to the law to envision and demand systemic change.

LAWP 290 Law and Society
Cross-listed with SOCI 230-01. This course is designed as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over law in everyday life, law and social inequality, and the politics of law, we will focus on the law's social, cultural, and political dimensions. Most notably, this course is organized around three major themes. The first topic concerns the theories and methods scholars deploy to account for the affinities between law and social life. We will consider how legal pronouncements and institutions shape and are shaped by our social norms, values, and relationships through the concepts of, among others, "legality," "legal consciousness," and "legal pluralism." The second part deals with the gap between the law on the books and the law in action. We will discuss when and how the law reinforces class, gender, and race-based inequalities despite its ever-present promise of justice. The final section examines the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change by calling attention to politics within and through the law. Thus, we will put as much emphasis on the law's ideological underpinnings as on how people resort to the law to envision and demand systemic change.

SOCI 330 Classical Sociological Theory
This course will examine alternative ways of understanding the human being, society, and culture as they have been presented in classical sociological theory (through 1925). It will focus on the theoretical logic of accounting for simple and complex forms of social life, interactions between social processes and individual and group identities, major and minor changes in society and culture, and the linkages between intimate and large-scale human experience. Prerequisite: 110 and one additional course in sociology, or permission of instructor. Offered every fall.