Legal Studies

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course is designed to fulfill the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. Students will learn to identify an author's point of view and main arguments; evaluate an author's credibility and the merits of his 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.
Reading and Composition in Connection with the Law as a Social Institution: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Reading and Composition in Connection with the Law as a Social Institution: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
The United States operates under the constraints imposed by a written constitution. We will explore the ways in which the Constitution affects the relationship between us as individuals and the state. We will focus on the 14th Amendment’s commands that the state provide us all equal protection of the laws, and that it not encroach on our substantive, fundamental rights without due process of the law.
Civil Rights Civil Liberties: Equality & Fundamental Rights: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
The United States operates under the constraints imposed by a written constitution. We will explore the ways in which the Constitution affects the relationship between us as individuals and the state. We will focus on issues of free speech and the relationship between the government and religion. We will do a deep dive into speech on college and high school campuses and throughout the religion unit we will likewise take a look at how these doctrines play out at school.

Civil Rights Civil Liberties: First Amendment: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Fall 2001, Fall 2000
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.
Freshman Seminars: Read More [+]

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.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

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.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
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.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

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.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
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.
Crime and Punishment: taking the measure of the US justice system: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from year to year.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Foundations of Legal Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
The United States has a legal system that developed from its English roots into a complicated set of rules and organizations that must serve the needs of a large, federal state with a dynamic market economy. This course surveys American law, both substantive and procedural, and the institutions that shape and implement it, including legislatures, courts, lawyers, and litigants. The course also provides students with a basic background in law and how it operates in the contemporary United States.
American Law and Legal Institutions: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2024
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.
Policing and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
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.
Theories of Law and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2019 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2018 First 6 Week Session, Fall 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.
Youth Justice and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018
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.
Theoretical Foundations of Criminal Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2018
This course explores philosophical themes bearing on the nature of the law and its relationship to morality: e.g., What is law—does its claim rest only on social processes or does law necessarily embody moral claims? Do we have an obligation to obey the law? What are the moral limits of legal punishment? The course will sharpen students’ skills in practical reasoning through the analysis of logical argument. The materials consist of readings from the assigned text and additional readings available on bCourses. The format will be a combination of lecture and classroom discussion, with a substantial number of ungraded group debates and simulations.
Philosophy of Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024
The purpose of this Writing Intensive discussion section is to spend extra time working together to practice all stages of the writing process, including drafting, revising, and editing. Through additional writing assignments, workshops of your ideas and paper drafts, and structured in-section debates, you will confront not only the course materials but also yourself as thinker. You will be asked to offer reflections on the readings, on your own writing, and on your classmates’ writing. The aim of these exercises will be to develop your ability to articulate clear and compelling arguments—both in your own writing and speech, and in providing feedback to others.
Philosophy of Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session
This is a lecture course in political philosophy, focusing on liberal political theory which emphasizes the protection of individual freedom as against social demands, the maintenance of social and economic equality, and the neutrality of the state in conditions of cultural and religious pluralism. By studying mainly modern authors, we will attempt to understand the importance of these goals and the possibility of their joint fulfillment. Attention will be paid to the work of John Rawls, to the problem of moral and political disagreement, and the relation between “ideal” thinking about justice and thinking about justice in conditions of racial and gender hierarchies.
Theories of Justice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2020
This is a course in political philosophy, focusing on liberal political theory which emphasizes the protection of individual freedom as against social demands, the maintenance of social and economic equality, and the neutrality of the state in conditions of cultural and religious pluralism. By studying modern authors, we will attempt to understand the importance of these goals and the possibility of their joint fulfillment. Attention will be paid to the work of John Rawls, to the problem of moral and political disagreement, and the relation between “ideal” thinking about justice and thinking about justice in conditions of racial and gender hierarchies. A deficient grade in LS 107WI cannot be removed by taking LS 107 or Poli Sci 117.
Theories of Justice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
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?
Aims and Limits of the Criminal Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2019, Spring 2018
Please refer to the Legal Studies website for specific topics.
Special Topics in Legal Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025
This course will survey recurrent dynamics of feminist social movements in the United States, while exploring in depth two contemporary social movements that aim to move the law in toward greater gender equality: the #MeToo Movement, and the movement to restore reproductive rights and advance reproductive justice after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Feminist Social Movements: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2019, Fall 2016
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.
Philosophy and Law in Ancient Athens: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2024
Data, Prediction and Law allows students to explore different data sources that scholars and government officials use to make generalizations and predictions in the realm of law. The course will also introduce critiques of predictive techniques in law. Students will apply the statistical and Python programming skills from Foundations of Data Science to examine a traditional social science dataset, “big data” related to law, and legal text data.
Data, Prediction & Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
This seminar offers an introduction to the concept and practice of human rights research and investigations, with an emphasis on the collection and analysis of online open source information. In addition to lectures and readings, the course will engage students in the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, an effort that supports the work of Amnesty International, the Syrian Archive, and a number of other organizations that are working to bring awareness to and collect evidence in support of international atrocity cases, including human rights law firms and international commissions of inquiry. In the seminar and lab, students will have an opportunity to engage in one or more real-world investigations.
Human Rights and War Crimes Investigations: Methods: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025
The deployment of AI systems in multiple domains of society raises fundamental challenges and concerns, such as accountability, liability, fairness, transparency and privacy. The dynamic nature of AI systems requires a new set of skills informed by ethics, law, and policy to be applied throughout the life cycle of such systems: design, development and deployment. Tackling these challenges calls for an interdisciplinary approach: deconstructing these issues by discipline and reconstructing with an integrated mindset, principles and practices. Students will work in teams on joint tasks devoted to a distinct legal or ethical question working on real-world legal challenges in a case-study format.

Responsible AI, Law, Ethics & Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
We will study the history of law and American imperialism in the Pacific Rim from the first Pacific whalers, fur traders, and missionaries of the early 1800s to the occupation of Japan and Philippine independence following the end of World War II. Over this period, the states and societies of the Pacific Rim experienced multiple legal and social revolutions and we will explore these across case studies of Oregon Territory, California, Hawai’i, Alaska, and the Philippines. We will critically examine the transformation from the “First” American continental empire to the “Second” American overseas empire, usually dated to 1898, through the lenses of race, indigeneity, capitalism, legal pluralism, and power.
Law & American Pacific Empire through World War II: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
We will explore the intersection of antisemitism and the law, by covering the history of law as a vehicle for institutionalizing antisemitism, law as a vehicle for combating antisemitism, and law as a political tool to combat antisemitism. Historical topics will include the Dreyfus case, the Holocaust denial trial of Irving v. Lipstadt, the Damascus blood libel trial of 1840, the blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, and the impact of the lynching of Leo Frank. We will also review discriminatory laws in the United States and other areas and countries against Jews, including in Nazi Germany.
Antisemitism and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020
This course highlights aspects of the development and implementation of human rights in society. Cases reveal the question facing all nations: to what extent should indigenous peoples be secure in their land, cultural integrity, political and economic rights. Fundamentally, this inquiry depends on recognizing the existence of inalienable and indivisible rights afforded to all humans.
Human Rights: The Native Experience: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
This course will introduce you to key concepts, issues, and legal frameworks around forced migration from legal, sociological, and normative perspectives. Using historical and contemporary examples, interdisciplinary scholarship, legal cases, media depictions of forced migration, and the voices of persons experiencing displacement, we will critically examine narratives about and responses to population displacement in international and domestic contexts.
Forced Migration: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
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.
Immigration and Citizenship: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
This course will explore the relationship between social movements and the law: it will take as its focus the movement for immigrant rights, increasingly led by undocumented activists. It will ask how legal action -- statutes, regulations, judicial decisions, and policies and practices of enforcement, at both state and federal levels -- has spurred the formation of a social movement, and how that movement has sought to influence, resist, and transform the law.
Law and Social Change: The Immigrant Rights Movement: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020
We will explore questions about migration and membership in the contemporary world by drawing on empirical and normative perspectives. By “empirical,” we investigate what social science evidence tells us about the drivers of migration or the benefits of citizenship. By “normative,” we think through questions of what a society ought to do: what is the morally right, just, or fair thing to do about issues of migration and citizenship?
Membership and Migration: Empirical and Normative Perspectives: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
This course introduces the study of comparative constitutional law in Latin America and will prepare students to acquire substantial training on the existing legal traditions in the world: the common law and the civil law systems.
We will study how political, social, and historical dynamics shape the work of state actors, such as the executive, legislative, judicial powers, as well as the legal profession, and civil society groups to mobilize legal and social change.
Law, Judicial Politics, and Rights in Latin America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2021
This course investigates the logic and lived reality of authoritarian law, with the goal of complicating the popular notion that authoritarian law is simply an instrument of state repression. We will mix more theoretical readings on approaches to law and the logic of courts with empirical studies of how law works in two historical settings (Nazi Germany and East Germany) and two contemporary cases (China and Russia). Part of our focus will be on elite politics, particularly the reasons leaders devolve power to courts and the control strategies they deploy to keep judges, lawyers and plaintiffs in check. At the same time, we will pay close attention to everyday law and how ordinary people experience the legal system.

Law & Rights in Authoritarian States: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
Comparative Equality Law uses a problem-based approach to examine how the law protects equality rights in different jurisdictions. The course will comparatively examine US, European, and other national, regional and international legal systems (including those of India, Brazil, Colombia, Canada and South Africa) and provide a global overview of legal protection from and legal responses to inequalities. The course covers 5 topic modules: Theories and sources of equality law; Employment discrimination law (race, sex, age, disability, LGBTQ+); Secularism, human rights and the legal rights of religious minorities; Sexual harassment/Violence; Affirmative action (race, caste, origin), and gender parity.
Comparative Equality Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
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.
The Supreme Court and Public Policy: Read More [+]

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.
Comparative Perspectives on Norms and Legal Traditions: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
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.
Property and Liberty: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
As longstanding symbols in American history and culture, “Wall Street” and “Main Street” typically refer to streets that intersect at right angles and places that represent the antithesis of each other. Wall Street is home to nefarious big banks run by greedy financiers with deep pockets, while Main Street is home to unassuming “mom-and-pop” shops patronized by ordinary people of modest means who live in the surrounding wholesome small towns. What’s good for one is not good for the other. This course, which will be co-taught by a historian and corporate law professor, will examine critical junctures in the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street in American history and culture over the course of the twentieth century.
Wall Street / Main Street: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course surveys the history of US monetary law from its inception to the coming about of cryptocurrencies. We begin with a discussion of monetary affairs in colonial times and during the American Revolutionary War. We then examine the framework established at the Constitutional Convention. We cover the 19th century and New Deal Supreme Court cases that shaped US monetary law as we know it today. Finally we discusses contemporary legal dilemmas such as the regulation of bitcoin and stablecoins, the creation of central bank digital currencies, the workarounds of the US debt ceiling and the debate over the spectrum of the Fed’s legal authority. We conclude by revisiting some classic questions concerning the nature and functions of money.
Monetary Law & Regulation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023
This course surveys the history of political economy before the middle of the twentieth century aiming to give students a broad introduction to the way in which modern economics emerged, and the varieties of schools of political economy that have been advanced since roughly the middle of the eighteenth century. It also surveys the critique of political economy in various eras, including recent criticisms of welfare economics and of economic inequality.
History of Political Economy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Law and Economics I: Read More [+]

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.
The Law and Economics of Innovation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
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.
Law and Economics II: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
Entrepreneurship plays an increasingly essential role in today’s global economy. New companies and startups play valuable roles in the formation of new industry, also spurring established incumbent companies towards further growth. This course is designed to explore the role of law in facilitating the development of entrepreneurial enterprises, paying special attention to the complex interaction between innovation and regulation. The purpose of this course is to provide students with a thorough foundation for understanding the role that law plays in the construction and growth of entrepreneurial enterprises.
Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2024
This course will investigate the phenomenon of intimate partner violence (also known as family violence, or domestic violence), by studying empirical evidence; theories of violence; and the disparate impacts on different communities. Through a trauma-centered and intersectional approach, students will be positioned to assess and analyze the responses by our legal system to this persistent and prevalent social problem.
Intimate Partner Violence & the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
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.
Law, Self, and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020, 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.
Human Rights & Technology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016
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
Law and Society in Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2019
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.
Human Rights, Research & Practice: Read More [+]

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?
Government and the Family: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2011 First 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.
Bioethics and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2024
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.
International Relations and International Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
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.
Law and Development: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Law & Sexuality: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
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."
Punishment, Culture, and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
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.
Law in Chinese Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Restorative Justice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2017, Fall 2016
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.
Adolescence, Crime and Juvenile Justice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2020
We will investigate the profound role of law and legal institutions in shaping and defining racial minority and majority communities. Students will interrogate the definition and meaning of race in U.S. society (e.g., whether race is biological, cultural, environmental, based on White supremacy, or a social construct that is constantly being transformed) and will critically examine the connection between law, race and racism, both in the historical and modern context. The course is a collaborative effort to learn the truths of our collective history; to share the truths of our individual experiences and lives; and, to determine if we desire a more just society, and if so, how to create our own paths and contributions to this endeavor.
Juvenile Justice & the Color of Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
How do people and communities envision and enact justice in response to state-sponsored and state-sanctioned violence? How have TRCs (Truth and Reconciliation Commissions) and analogous approaches taken shape in the U.S., in response to state-sponsored violence, including “legal violence”? With South Africa’s TRC as a foundational model, this course will examine an array of community-based strategies for surfacing truths about historical harms, pursuing accountability through apologies and reparations, and restoring relationships, communities, artifacts, and lands. We will address the challenges when establishing official commissions, reaching out to communities, and following through with recommendations.
Truth, Justice & Reconciliation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Summer 2022 First 6 Week Session
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.
Sex, Reproduction and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course will examine policing and mass incarceration in the contemporary United States. The first half of the course will explore policing, considering how the modern police emerged, whether police reduce crime, and why police violence persists. The second half of the course will turn to mass incarceration, examining how the U.S. came to incarcerate people at a greater rate than any nation in history, along with the individual and social consequences of incarceration. For both policing and mass incarceration, we will devote significant focus to the prospects for reform.
Criminal Justice in the United States: Policing, Mass Incarceration, and Paths to Reform: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
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.
Crime and Criminal Justice: Read More [+]

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.
European Legal History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023
This course seeks to engage students in a critical investigation of the origins of the University of California through a settler colonial lens, and with the aim of decolonizing the University’s narrative history. Decolonization is a process by which narratives, world views, cultures, and institutions, once erased by colonization are returned, respected, and honored. Drawing upon the work of the UC Berkeley Truth & Justice Project, this Course will explore the history of UC and its racial and colonial foundations. We will focus on decolonization and therefore center Indigenous and other racialized communities, discussing injustice in various communities and from various perspectives.
Decolonizing UC Berkeley: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
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.
Making Empire: Law and the Colonization of America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Spring 2024
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.
Comparative Constitutional Law: The Case of Israel: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023
This class first introduces students to the origins of the access to justice problem, paying attention to disparate impacts along the lines of race, class, and gender. It examines how the costs of legal services, and in turn of law school tuition, steadily rose in the last several decades. Drawing on both historical and comparative case studies, students will then be encouraged to think creatively about who can represent individuals at law. Further inspiration comes from contemporary case studies outside North America and Europe. Finally, students will have an opportunity to execute a guided research project on a historical, comparative, or contemporary aspect of access to justice that helps shed light on potential solutions today.
Access to Justice: Comparative and Historical Perspectives: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2015 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 Second 6 Week Session
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.
Twentieth-Century American Legal and Constitutional History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
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.
Survey of American Legal and Constitutional History: Read More [+]

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.
Seminar on American Legal and Constitutional History: Read More [+]

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.
Comparative Constitutional Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2014
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.
Implicit Bias: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2013
Psychology is the study of the human mind and its effect on behavior. Law attempts to regulate behavior through norm setting, policing, and punishment. This course gives a survey of the natural connection between law and psychology. Here, we will study the psychology of legal systems, of crime and policing, and of what happens in the courtroom, including criminal charging, jury selection, eyewitness testimony, prosecution, and conviction. Throughout, we will analyze the theoretical and empirical evidence as it applies generally and to special populations (children, the impaired, those with mental illnesses, and racial and sexual minorities).
Psychology and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
We will explore the nature and function of law and legal systems. What is the nature of legal authority? Where does it originate? Why do we obey it? From where does law come? How are laws made? How do judges reason? We will also focus on law and conflict resolution: How do people bring cases to court? How do judges decide cases? Are there alternatives to the legal process? Finally, a traditional conception of law is that it is a timeless set of principles, yet society is always changing. How then does law change? How do courts respond to social change? To what extent can courts bring about social change? Readings are from a variety of fields: philosophy, history, judicial opinions, and scholarly articles.
Law, Politics and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
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.
Psychology of Diversity and Discrimination in American Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
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.
Sociology of Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
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.
Prison: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, 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.
Diversity, Law & Politics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Summer 2013 10 Week Session, 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.
Feminist Jurisprudence: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
Advanced study in law and society with specific topics to be announced.
Seminar on Topics in Law and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Honors Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Study of an advanced topic under the supervision of a faculty member leading to the completion of a senior honors thesis.
Honors Thesis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
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 two unit Legalst H195C seminar during the second semester of the Honors Program along with the three units of Legalst H195B.
Legal Studies Honors Research and Writing Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from year to year.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Enrollment restrictions apply. Consult the Legal Studies department for more information.
Supervised Independent Study and Research: Read More [+]