The Sociology of Law

Sociology has always been engaged in the study of law and, in this course, we will study law with the tools of sociology. In the first half of the course, we will examine how law makes society, focusing on the way that legal ideas create institutions like courts, citizenship and money; social practices like marriage, criminality, free-lancing and inequality; and even identities like race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality. In the second half, we will consider how people interact with legal institutions, voluntarily to achieve their goals and involuntarily to be disciplined by others. We will use both US and international examples.