SHUM 4875 - Critical Legal Geography

(crosslisted)
(also GOVT 4675)

Fall. 4 credits.

Co-meets with LAW 7772. Limited to 15 students.

I. Braverman.

This seminar will introduce students to the emerging tradition of Critical Legal Geography, which offers heightened attention to the political and power-ridden properties of law and spatiality, both widely defined. We will unravel the overlooked properties of law and space, exposing their treatment as technical, neutral, and a-political and their real and imagined entanglements with various forms of power. The seminar will draw on a wide variety of scholars-including Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Duncan Kennedy-to explore a few of the major areas of focus within (and in the margins of) Critical Legal Geography, including: borders and checkpoints, the private/public divide, constitutionally protected spaces, wilderness and the law, animality and biopower, and even “loo laws” and sanitary surveillance. The students will learn how to approach legal texts and statements critically so as to expose the technologies of powers that underlie their existence.