Course Description:

In your Legal Methods course, you will have a chance to encounter the internal logics and rationalities that govern the life cycle of law. In this core course, we will encounter a set of social and political logics that influence the life of the law. This course provides a social science and humanities perspective on the variegated lives of law. These may not always neatly map onto the life of the law as described from the point of view of a statute, or a court judgment, or a procedural protocol. In this course, we ask: 1) how have societies made and maintained institutions and processes that make rules, promote their adherence, interpret and adjudicate them? 2) How do modern, secular legal systems interact with the internal hierarchies and power structures of culture and religion? 3) How does the legal apparatus exclude and include different categories of persons? We especially investigate legality as a primary feature of the social condition, and simultaneously, see the legal condition as a socially produced one. Through the diverse spread of assigned texts, we will travel to other parts of the world, not only  India, and apply our questions and struggles to those geopolitical theatres. We will also talk a fair bit about the makings and unmakings of international legal regimes, in contemporary and historical contexts. We will use texts from scholarship in sociology and anthropology of law, philosophy and political theory, law and society, law and humanities to respond to these questions.