LAWS308

This course is designed to provide students with skills necessary to communicate with the growing Spanish-speaking community in the United States and abroad in legal and human services contexts. Conducted entirely in Spanish, Spanish for Legal Services will build on the students’ previous skills in order to develop their listening, speaking, writing and reading skills in Spanish. Specifically, it will focus on the need to understand legal rules and decisions within specific historical and social contexts. To this end, students will be introduced to the differences between “common law” as practiced in the United States, England, Australia, etc and “civil law” as practiced in Spain and Latin American countries (with the exception of Guyana and Brazil, in some cases). The course will also emphasize laws as social and historical constructions by examining discourses from scholarly articles, government websites, novels and movies. Since the course has been designed to also help human services professionals such as social workers navigate through the American legal system, it will emphasize how to conduct interviews in order to build a relationship with the client and give specific instructions in Spanish using the appropriate vocabulary. The course will end with an introduction to the principles of legal interpreting. As with other language courses, by learning Spanish, students will also gain insight into the nature of their own language and culture in a comparative way- particularly, “false cognates” (words and phrases that sound similar to English but have different meanings) relevant to the legal field.