ENROLL

Serena R Zabin

An enormous variety of people told stories of their lives in early America’s courtrooms. Trials from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are some of the best places for historians to learn about ordinary people and the world in which they lived. Enslaved Africans, pregnant women, wealthy men, and even transgender people were part of early American trials. Sometimes they were there to defend themselves, their lives, and their choices. Others were there as plaintiffs who tried to use the legal system to shape the world around them.  Emphasizing both history and law, this course will be based primarily on trial transcripts and other court papers from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America.

Held for new first year students

Steven G Poskanzer

This seminar will explore pressing legal and policy issues facing American colleges and universities. The course will address the ways core academic values (e.g., academic freedom; the creation and maintenance of a community based on shared values) fit or conflict with legal rules and political dynamics that operate beyond the academy. Likely topics include how college admissions are shaped by legal principles, with particular emphasis on debates over affirmative action; on-campus speech; faculty tenure; intellectual property; student rights and student discipline (including discipline for sexual assault); and college and university relations with the outside world.

Dev Gupta

Extra Time Required

Jonathan H Dickstein

This course introduces students to the history of the South and East Asian religious ethic of nonviolence (ahiṃsā). We will discuss nonviolence and vegetarianism in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, including critical perspectives from inside and outside of those traditions. The course will explore the philosophical and cultural aspects of nonviolence, with a focus on its relationship to karma, self-purification, animal welfare, and food practices. We conclude by examining modern deployments of the ethic in charged discourses concerning agriculture, nationalism, environmental destruction and conservation, and social justice.