SHUM 4502 - Temporality, Modernity, and the Law

Fall. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

K. Clarke.

Law is intensely preoccupied with constructions of temporality, especially in relation to its jurisdictional limits. This course on conceptions of time within the law will complement scholarly work that examines conceptualizations of time as a social construct in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. The course will explore time as a subjective phenomenon associated with streams of thoughts and perceptions that constitute our psycho-social life. Such an understanding of the subjective construction of time as a social phenomenon is contrasted with notions of an “objective outer world of time,” as symbolized by a clock or by a legal science void of subjective influences. By examining demarcations of time as an inquiry into human thought and cultural order, this course will explore how temporal rationalities are ordered, instantiated and constituted in daily life.

For longer description and Fellows’ bios please visit www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/index.html.