LAWS201

"The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be." Lao-tzu.
"Laws are spider webs to which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." Honore de Balzac
"This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As these quotes illustrate, societies around the world have different social norms, beliefs and traditions, as well as different ways of ordering society through law and of reflecting upon the relationship between law, justice, and society. This course is an introduction to the current global legal order from a sociolegal, interdisciplinary perspective. We will explore the major legal traditions of the world—customary law, Civil law, common law, the Islamic legal tradition, the Hindu legal tradition, the Confucian legal tradition, and the similarities and differences among them, primarily in terms of their origin, main features, sources, institutions, embeddedness in cultures, and current controversies. We will also examine some of the ways in which they are changing in our globalized world in light of legal pluralism, the globalization of law, and new regional and supra~regi0nal structures.