It can be tempting to think of law-breaking and obedience as either/or propositions. I suppose there is some truth to this — our criminal system is, after all, predicated on a jury’s ability to say whether something happened or not, and whether someone was responsible or not — but thinking about law in black and white terms obscures the complexities imposed on it by the cultures that surround it. Who we think we are affects our relationships with rules, laws, and norms, and the groups with which we identify mould our reactions to those constraints. Socially ascribed attributes and roles influence our perceptions of the law, and organizations influence both identity and the implementation of law. These are just of a few of of the intersections between law, culture, and identity that motivate this course.
This class, to steal a phrase from William Ian Miller, is “methodologically promiscuous as a matter of methodological commitment.” We’re after myriad ways that who we (think we) are and the groups to which we (think we) belong change the ways we think about and react to law, and — while we will explore many approaches from within the public law/law and society literatures — we will sample rather liberally from psychology, sociology, literary criticism, and film. Law, it turns out, is everywhere, so we will look for it everywhere.
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