Legal Studies

The intercollegiate and interdisciplinary program in Legal Studies seeks to illuminate law from a liberal arts perspective, with ideas and methods from disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. It is also intended to help unify and increase the student’s appreciation of these other disciplines by using them to study law as a central social phenomenon and repository of values.

A premise of the program in legal studies is that law, when approached from a liberal arts perspective, reveals a collection of magnificent intellectual and social structures that are too important - and too interesting - to be left entirely to professionals. By contrast, American law schools are specialized graduate institutions, with their own traditions and systems of values, and have a largely professional orientation. They teach the doctrine of law brilliantly, in their severely analytic style, but for this very reason they can give at best only secondary attention to the goal of exploring the relationships of law with other aspects of intellectual and social endeavor.

The program in legal studies is completed as part of a dual major with another academic discipline. The major requires six courses in legal studies and a minimum of eight courses in the other discipline of the dual major. For further information on dual majors and the requirements for the other discipline of the dual major, check the appropriate sections of this catalog. Each student’s individual program must be approved by the Chair of the Supervisory Committee.

Primary Contact: Professor George Thomas, Program Coordinator