LAW 7414

Legal History Colloquium

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

This is a three-credit colloquium. The course will combine close reading of cutting-edge scholarship with in-person discussions featuring at least six leading legal historians and instruction in legal-historical methods. Organized around both methodological and substantive questions, the course will explore topics spanning the colonial period through the late twentieth-century United States. Major themes will include: (1) Reading Law—how to interpret legal sources through a critical historical lens; (2) Using Law—the ways social movements and reformers have deployed law as a tool of change; (3) Enforcing Law—the multiple institutions, actors, and mechanisms through which law is implemented; and (4) Resisting Law—how individuals and communities have sought to live outside, against, or beyond legal authority. Substantive topics will range from founding-era debates over constitutionalism to the history of intellectual property and civil rights in the administrative state. Students will produce original legal history research papers based on both primary and secondary sources.

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