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.

Primary Contact: Professor Tamara Venit-Shelton, Program Coordinator