Nov 22, 2024
OHIO University Undergraduate Catalog 2019-20

CAS 2500 - Breaking the Law Theme Seminar


The dominant global forces that have defined the 21st century have massively transformed law and legal frameworks, at both local and global levels. How do states assert power and enact violence through law, and how are these enactments resisted, challenged, and overcome? What does justice mean in relation to citizenship, political dissent, and political discourse in the U.S.? In relation to international human rights regimes and post-conflict justice mechanisms? In relation to global disparities in access to health care and other basic human goods? How are our understandings of our own bodies, lives, and futures shaped by law? This four-credit team-taught interdisciplinary course sets out these and other central questions about law, justice, social change, human rights, globalization, and technology in the new global era.

Requisites: Fr or Soph
Credit Hours: 4
General Education Code: 2SS
Repeat/Retake Information: May be retaken two times excluding withdrawals, but only last course taken counts.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 2.5 seminar, 1.5 lecture
Grades: Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I
Learning Outcomes:
  • Students will demonstrate understanding of law’s formative and constitutive role in social, cultural, and political life.
  • Students will develop understanding of the complex relationships among law, politics, culture, and power.
  • Students will gain an understanding of law and justice in relationship to citizenship, dissent, protest, and social change, in domestic as well as global contexts.
  • Students will gain understanding of how law and law-like systems of rules empower and constrain individuals, groups, organizations, and communities in cross-cultural and cross-temporal contexts.
  • Students will learn to analyze law holistically, as a social institution that is culturally constructed, politically contested, and historically contingent.


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