Apart from their assigned mod courses, 1L students may only enroll in courses offered as 1L electives. A complete list of these courses can be found on the 1L Elective Listings page. 1L students must use the 1L class number listed on the course description when enrolling.
215.9 sec. 001 - Legal Theory Seminar (Spring 2024)
Instructor: Hanoch Dagan
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Units: 3
Grading Designation: Graded
Mode of Instruction: In-Person
Meeting:
Tu 3:35 PM - 6:15 PM
Location: Law 244
From January 09, 2024
To April 16, 2024
Course End: April 16, 2024
Class Number: 33080
Enrollment info:
Enrolled: 7
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 24
As of: 04/27 08:26 AM
Legal theory focuses on the work of society’s coercive normative institutions, such as courts, legislatures, and agencies. It studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typifying their members, while at the same time continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. In performing the latter tasks, legal theory necessarily absorbs lessons from law’s neighboring disciplines, such as philosophy, economics, and sociology. But at its best, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbors, because of its pointed attention to the persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law’s normativity and its coerciveness and the implications of its institutional and structural characteristics.
This course explores these features of law. We will begin by investigating law’s three constitutive components: its coerciveness, its normativity, and the institutional settings in which it is manifested. We will then turn to examine various modes of legal reasoning: the application of rules or of standards, and of abstract or contextual analyses; references to history and to economic analysis; and reliance on rights. The last part of the course will be dedicated to explore the role of law in society. We will then discuss law’s legitimacy and authority, the rule of law, the relationships between social norms and legal rules, and the different types of legal persons and of modes of legal work.
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Requirements Satisfaction:
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Exam Notes: (P) Final paper
Course Category: Legal Theory
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