Spring 2017 | Kirstine Taylor Teaches LJC Course on Race, Violence, and Law

Dr. Kirstine Taylor, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law, Justice and Culture, is teaching LJC 4500x: Special Seminar in Law, Justice & Culture, focusing on race, violence and the law, for the upcoming Spring 2017 semester.

The course will be on Wednesdays from 6:05-8:50 p.m. Taylor specializes in race and law.

LJC 4500x is open to all juniors and seniors who are interested in the relationship between race, violence, and the law in the American context.

The course counts as an elective for the Law, Justice & Culture certificate program. The deadline to apply for the certificate has been extended to Oct. 25.

Some questions students will answer in the class include:

• Does law – understood variously as constitutionality, legal sanction, rights, and enforcement – suppress practices of race-based violence?
• In a nation marked by a long and living history of white supremacy, is law a powerful tool of recourse, resistance, political struggle, and freedom?
• Alternatively, when and how might law create, sustain, or institutionalize violence against people of color?
• What roles do gender and sexuality play in negotiating the boundaries of violence and law?

This course examines the complex relationship between race, violence, and law in the history of the United States. We use historical texts and current scholarship to critically interrogate this relationship.

Part I of the course focuses on questions of constitutionalism, slavery, and violence in the abolitionist thought of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry David Thoreau. Part II of the course considers the problem of violence during the height and fall of Jim Crow. Here, we read Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and others.

Part III of the course considers relationships of law and violence during the era of mass incarceration, police violence, border detention, and national security, thus exploring how we might theorize law and violence for contemporary times.

See the spring elective course offerings for the Law, Justice & Culture certificate.

For more information, contact Kirstine Taylor.