POLI 346 - Seminar on the U.S. Courts and Legal System

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as AFRS 346) This course is designed to promote and facilitate healthy discussion, debate, and dialogue about the U.S. legal system and the centrality of race, ethnicity, and politics in the system. Students start the course by examining the roots of the modern legal system. In part II of the course, students explore the legal processes and actors significant to the system, such as police officers, lawyers, jurors, and jurists. Special attention is given to investigating and discussing diversity within the legal system and the myriad factors influencing legal actors’ decisions. The course concludes with students exploring and researching some of the issues facing the courts and our criminal legal system, such as the criminalization of marginalized populations, mass imprisonment and e-carceration, crimmigration, the treatment of individuals detained and confined in local, state, and federal penal institutions, the politics of re-entry and life post-incarceration, and demands for justice, reform, and abolition. Taneisha Means.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS