LLS100 | Introduction to Law and Social Sciences

In your Legal Methods and Jurisprudence courses, you have had a chance to encounter the internal logics and rationalities that govern the life cycle of law. In this core course, we will encounter a set of social and political logics that influence the life of the law. This course provides a social science and humanities perspective on the variegated lives of law. These may not always neatly map onto the life of the law as described from the point of view of a statute, or a court judgment. In this course, we ask: how have societies made and maintained institutions and processes that make rules, promote their adherence, interpret and adjudicate them? How do modern, secular legal systems interact with the internal hierarchies and power structures of culture and religion? How does the legal apparatus exclude and include different categories of persons? We especially investigate legality as a primary feature of the social condition, and see the legal condition as a socially produced one. Through the spread of assigned texts, we will travel to other parts of the world, not just India, and apply our questions and struggles to those geopolitical theatres. We will talk a fair bit about the makings and unmakings of international legal regimes. Each week, we read one traditional (a somewhat older text, or a recent text revisiting an older question) and something more current and linked to today’s global and regional crises – genocide, climate change, secularism and its discontents, human rights, and so on. The third session each week is devoted to discussion based on student’s weekly blogposts. We will use texts from scholarship in sociology and anthropology of law, law and society, law and humanities to respond to these questions.