College of Arts and Sciences

Law, Politics and Society

Program Options

• Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) with a major in Law, Politics and Society

Law, Politics and Society department web site

The information on this page pertains to program requirements for students who matriculated in the 2023-2024 academic year.  View requirements for previous catalog years here.

Program Overview

The Law, Politics and Society (LPS) program offers students an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex interactions of law, culture, economics, politics, and social structure. The program does not treat law as a fixed, naturally given feature of social life, nor as a professional practice reserved only for specialists such as lawyers, judges and legislators. Instead, we understand law as a pervasive part of everyday life, socially constructed and often contested.

As a liberal arts major, the LPS program is designed to provide students with a broad education contributing to their pre-professional and personal growth, in preparation for effective participation in civil society, and ethical global citizenship.

B.A. Degree Requirements

Through their coursework, LPS students will encounter the structures and people that create, interpret, implement, and are affected by law; they will engage in in-depth examination of problems and opportunities facing contemporary societies, and identify the complex web of contributing legal, political, and social factors – as well as possible solutions to those problems. Students will leave the major with a more critical and nuanced understanding of the historical underpinnings of contemporary law, politics, and society, able to critically evaluate normative claims, and craft their own unique and imaginative responses to current issues.

In this major, LPS students will:

• read and understand legal texts, court decisions, and theoretical writing, as well as use those texts effectively to convey complex ideas and arguments in writing;
• know and articulate the difference between law as a professional practice and law as a topic of liberal arts inquiry;
• demonstrate awareness of how issues of justice, morality, authority, order, legitimacy, individualism and community create tensions within ordered social life;
• explain how historical development and different cultural practices, social organizations and political systems affect law and justice around the world;
• examine how factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and religion impact legal, social, and political life;
• deploy contemporary legal, critical and/or interpretive theories in their own analyses of political, social or legal events or situations;
• participate actively as citizens in civil society.

*Related fields include:

• Anthropology
• Economics
• English
• Environmental Science and Policy
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Politics and International Relations
• Religion
• Rhetoric
• Sociology