Law and Society

Academic year 2011-12

Date last modified

23-4-2012 1:29

Period

Period 1

Startdate:

05-Sep-11

Enddate:

28-Oct-11

Code

SSC2027

ECTS credits

5.0

Organisational unit

University College Maastricht

Coordinator

T.J. Dekker

Description

• To study law as a social phenomenon and discuss several theoretical approaches to law and society. • To examine a variety of legal processes, such as conflict resolution, lawmaking, social control and change, and seek to understand how they function empirically.

Goals

Legal scholars generally focus their attention on the law as it appears in books. They look at formal manifestations of the law, such as constitutions, statutes, legal rulings and court structures. While this is certainly an important aspect of studying law, we would miss quite a lot if we limited our attention to the formal structures of law, and ignored the larger society in which law functions. While law in action bears some resemblance to law in books, law as a social phenomenon is often far more complex than is apparent from the formal manifestations of law alone. This course looks at the law in action: it studies law as a social phenomenon. Only when we understand how the major elements of a legal system function together in a specific social context, can we really understand how law affects society and how society in turn shapes law. The first part of the course will introduce the sociological study of law. We will give an overview of the field, discuss several prominent theoretical approaches and examine various methods of researching socio- legal questions. The second part of the course will examine several legal processes in detail, using the tools that were developed in the first half of the course. In particular, we will look at the organization of law, the making of law, law as a means of social control, dispute resolution and law as a means of social change.

Instruction language

Prerequisites

SSC1001 Macro Sociology or SSC1007 Introduction to Law.

Recommended literature

• Sutton, J.R. (2001) Law/Society: Origins, Interactions, and Change. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks - London.

Teaching methods

PBL
PRESENTATION(S)
LECTURE(S)
ASSIGNMENT(S)
PAPER(S)

Assessment methods

FINAL PAPER
ATTENDANCE
PARTICIPATION
WRITTEN EXAM
ORAL EXAM
TAKE HOME EXAM

Key words