This course introduces students to an on-going dialogue at the core of Western intellectual history about how to think about justice. The course examines how the attempt to achieve clarity about the fundamental problems of justice gives rise to new […]
Topics & readings. This interdisciplinary course focuses on economic inequality in the United States and its relationship to social and political inequality. Readings will be drawn primarily from the fields of political science, sociology, and economics. Readings will describe socioeconomic […]
Inherent within criminal law and justice is the power to make discretionary decisions that greatly impact the accused, victims, and society. This course exposes students to historical and contemporary issues that generate interaction between ethics and criminal justice. It will […]
Juvenile delinquency poses difficult and interesting problems for youth policy and criminal justice policy. This course looks at the misconduct of youths that brings them within the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts, and focuses on the complex problem of whether […]
The United States leads the Western world in the use of harsh punishments: life sentences, death sentences, and extended solitary confinement. Each of these punishments is a type of death penalty: life sentence prisoners are sentenced to die in prison, […]
This course focuses on the extent to which inequality and public policy affect a child’s experience of childhood. The course draws on historical, sociological and legal perspectives to examine what rights children have (and when they might lose them), the […]
Our practices of holding one another responsible for wrongdoing depend on the attribution of moral agency, and the view that, as human beings, we are not simply causes in the world, but authors of our actions. Contemporary psychological research increasingly […]
Political and social leaders accuse each other of it, and are accused by a media that itself is then condemned for it. It is tweeted, re-tweeted, articles are written, journals published, and blogs devoted to it but what is […]
This course will examine military, humanitarian, and post-conflict peacebuilding interventions to explore how the international community has worked to support victims of mass violence, injustice, brutal dictatorships, and poverty around the world. Students will first survey interventions in contexts of […]
The aim in this course is to achieve a deeper understanding of how justice and history are interwoven, and to see some of the limits and possibilities of the human condition more clearly. Through ancient and contemporary plays, literature, and […]
Economic globalization refers to the increasing integration of national economies across the world through intensified cross-border movement of goods, services, technology and capital. Some view it with trepidation, as a juggernaut of untrammeled capitalism marked by such economic interdependence that […]
Although it might seem that the law provides rules for personal and business conduct that are definitive and clear, in reality the law more often balances complex interests that involve many shades of gray. This course examines a series of […]
Millions of refugees and other displaced people are fleeing war and violence from the Middle East to Central America and beyond. This course examines this global phenomenon, as well as one of the world’s least well-known refugee crises the forced […]
Great minds of every generation have struggled to explain why bad things happen to good people, why humans are cruel to one another, and, especially for the followers of the Abrahamic faiths, how a world can have evil in it […]