FYS513

Disputes are universal; resolution, punishment, and enforcement, however, are as diverse as humanity itself. This course looks beyond American-centered understandings to investigate the deep history of law across space and time. Students explore legal cosmologies, the friction between codes and the messy world of corrupt judges and litigious peasants, the legal orders of smugglers and mafia, and the conflict between indigenous customary law and the systems of settler colonial societies. They grapple with a set of questions centered on relations of power: Do legal orders buttress hierarchies? Or can they be mobilized by marginalized peoples to assert rights long denied?