This course is a seminar on the history of political thought. Its focus is the social contract tradition and its critics, including criticisms or amendments of contract theory based on the alleged sociability of humankind. We will study canonical texts in this tradition, with a special interest in their implications for law.

Readings will include works by Aristotle, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls, and others.

Students will be expected to engage in close readings of these texts, participate in seminar discussion, and undertake a series of written reflections.

This course is a Foundations seminar in the PhD Program in Jurisprudence & Social Policy (JSP) and is open to all JSP, JD, LLM, and JSD students as well as graduate students from other campus departments.

Fall Semester 2025 – Cross-Sectional Course: Law 210.2A, Political Science 211.1

This course is a workshop for discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The workshop creates a space for students to engage directly with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions, with the goal of fostering critical thinking about concepts of value and developing analytical thinking and writing skills. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines and perspectives who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues philosophers and theorists should know something about.

The theme for the Fall 2025 workshop is “Expression: Its Value and its Norms.” We'll look at new and recent work on free speech in a range of contexts, including political speech, artistic expression, online speech, campus protest, and academic freedom. Presenters are Eugene Volokh (Hoover), Erwin Chemerinsky (Berkeley), Jacob Mchangama (Vanderbilt), Rae Langton (Cambridge), David Cole (Georgetown), Seana Shiffrin (UCLA), Sarah Song (Berkeley), Mary Anne Franks (George Washington), Daphne Keller (Stanford), Adrienne Stone (Melbourne), Erin Miller (USC), Lea Ypi (LSE), and Ben Eidelson (Harvard).
 

China’s rise is one of the most important issues in international affairs today. The consequences
of China’s increasing power and influence touch on all aspects of international relations, from
trade to military affairs, climate change to entertainment. This course provides an overview of
the major developments in contemporary Chinese foreign policy since the establishment of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. We will seek to answer questions such as: to what
extent is Chinese foreign policy simply a reflection of systemic variables such as shifts in the
balance of power? What roles do ideology, culture, leadership psychology and domestic politics
play?