SMNR: Human Rights and Global Inequality: Law, History, Politics

• Semester: Fall 2019
• Course ID: 397S
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 28675

Description

Political leaders across the spectrum have called economic inequality a defining challenge of our time. This seminar aims to understand the legal, historical, and political drivers and dynamics of deeply entrenched inequality, within as well as across countries. Drawing from a range of disciplines (such as law, history, and international relations) and analytical frameworks (including, but not limited to racial capitalism, critical legal theories, and world systems theory), we will consider how law distributes resources in ways that maintain and reproduce historical patterns of domination, subordination, and accumulation. We will apply these questions to a range of geographical locations as well as to a variety of issues at the intersection of inequality and human rights, including labor, natural resource extraction, and land distribution.

The seminar will be organized around the visits of leading scholars who will come to the Law School to present their research in a public forum. Students will spend roughly two weeks considering work by each speaker as well as related scholarly materials.

Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, write short critical responses to papers provided by visiting scholars, and write a longer, final essay on a topic related to the themes that arise during the semester. The course is open to law students as well as to non-law graduate and professional students with relevant background.