Legal studies degree programs

July 30, BestCollegeReviews. Studying legal studies in college provides several opportunities across the job market. Many with a degree in this discipline go on to become paralegals or lawyers, and employment of both of these is expected to grow between now and , according to the U.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, does the program offer any specializations or concentrations? These could range from international law to advocacy to business, and they provide additional credentials that can be helpful when starting a career or going onto graduate school. Additionally, if one wishes to become a paralegal, it is important to see if the program is an American Bar Association-approved degree. This accreditation, according to the ABA, is designed to foster high-quality paralegal education and training.

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GI Bill is a registered trademark of the U. Department of Veterans Affairs. More information about education benefits offered by VA is available on the U. The UCSP requirement may be waived if you previously earned a graduate degree from a regionally accredited institution. For more information, contact your academic advisor. Formerly HUMN An analysis of one of the most important means of artistic expression of the 20th century.

The goal is to acquire a deeper understanding of the aesthetic qualities of film by considering the stylistic elements of film as it has evolved throughout the century and weighing the special relationship between cinema and literature. Fulfills the laboratory science requirement. An introduction to the structure and function of living organisms. The aim is to apply the scientific method and use scientific and quantitative reasoning to make informed decisions about experimental results in the biological sciences.

Topics include the chemical foundations of life, cell biology, genetics, evolution, ecosystems, and interdependence of living organisms. Discussion also covers the importance of the scientific method to biological inquiry and the impact of biological knowledge and technology on human societies.

Laboratory activities emphasize the scientific method. An interdisciplinary introduction to the role of technology in contemporary society. The aim is to apply principles and concepts from a variety of social science disciplines e.

Topics include the way technology changes relationships, the cumulative advantages and disadvantages associated with technology, digital natives versus digital immigrants, the pace of technological change, changes to the nature of how people learn and think, and the meaning of technology in society. A hands-on study of current social networking applications and approaches to protect against cyber attacks and enhance personal cybersecurity.

The goal is to collaborate and interact through personal and professional social networking while developing and using computer security best practices. Discussion covers issues associated with the impact of social computing on individuals and society. Projects include creating and maintaining accounts on selected social networking sites. A survey of basic concepts and principles in micro- and macroeconomics and how the economy has been affected by technology.

The aim is to define and explain the key terms and concepts in economics and determine how technology has affected consumers, producers, and markets, as well as economic growth and policy. Topics include how innovation affects labor markets, the value of information, and the role of technological change in the economy. For online sections, access to a broadband internet connection, use of a digital camera capable of recording minute videos, and the ability to save and transfer video to a hosting site required.

Fulfills the prerequisite for all upper-level SPCH courses. An introduction to oral communication, with emphasis on interpersonal communication, small-group communication, and public speaking. The objective is to prepare speeches, provide feedback to others, and participate in group activities.

A study of the scientific and quantitative foundations of the applied science of human nutrition. The goal is to understand how nutrition reflects an integration across scientific disciplines and how foods provide important nutrients that provide substance and energy for healthy living.

Punishment, Culture, and Society: Read Less [-]. Terms offered: Summer First 6 Week Session, Spring , Fall The course examines concepts that form the basis of the Chinese legal system, traditional theories and institutions of pre society, and the expression and rejection of the traditional concepts in the laws of the Nationalist period and the People's Republic.

Terms offered: Fall , Spring , Spring This course advances the claim that the criminal justice system is both a product and a powerful engine of racial hierarchy in American society, and that strategies of restorative justice, which have recently garnered attention in settings from prisons to middle schools, hold out promise as practices of racial justice. We explore this thesis by examining the ways in which criminal justice systems shape the emotions and social relations of victims , offenders, and members of the larger community.

Terms offered: Fall , Fall , Fall This course examines the premises, doctrine, and operational behavior of juvenile courts, particularly in relation to the commission of seriously anti-social acts by mid-adolescents. Topics include the history of theories of delinquency; the jurisprudence of delinquency; the incidence and severity of delinquency; police response to juvenile offenders; the processes of juvenile courts and youth corrections; and reforms or alternatives to the juvenile court system.

Terms offered: Fall , Summer First 6 Week Session, Fall We will investigate the profound role of law and legal institutions in shaping and defining racial minority and majority communities.

Students will interrogate the definition and meaning of race in U. The course is a collaborative effort to learn the truths of our collective history; to share the truths of our individual experiences and lives; and, to determine if we desire a more just society, and if so, how to create our own paths and contributions to this endeavor. Course Objectives: Apply critically relevant law to hypothetical scenarios involving racial groups. Demonstrate understanding of relevant law that has been previously applied to racial groups.

Describe the four major schools of thought on law and race i. Explain the connection between law, race and racism in different analytical frameworks, including the frameworks listed in Course Objective 1.

Terms offered: Summer First 6 Week Session, Spring , Spring This course examines recent American legal and social history with respect to reproductive and sexual behavior. We will consider two theoretical aspects of the problem: first, theories of how law regulates social behavior and second, more general theories about how reproduction is socially regulated.

Terms offered: Not yet offered This course will examine policing and mass incarceration in the contemporary United States. The first half of the course will explore policing, considering how the modern police emerged, whether police reduce crime, and why police violence persists. The second half of the course will turn to mass incarceration, examining how the U. For both policing and mass incarceration, we will devote significant focus to the prospects for reform.

Course Objectives: Students will be able to critically evaluate arguments about policing and incarceration made by both scholarly and popular commentators. Students will be able to describe the problems currently facing the systems of policing and prisons in the United States. Students will be able to propose and defend reforms to bring about more just and effective systems of policing and incarceration.

Students will be able to take sides in current debates over policing and incarceration. Terms offered: Summer Second 6 Week Session, Spring , Fall Introduction to the etiology of crime and criminal justice administration.

What is crime? What are the main features and problems of the process by which suspected criminals are apprehended, tried, sentenced, punished?

Past and current trends and policy issues will be discussed. Terms offered: Fall , Fall Most contemporary legal systems derive from one or the other of the two legal orders that developed in continental Europe and England over the course of the centuries. This course introduces students to some of the main features of the continental European or civil law tradition, a tradition that has its origins in Roman law. We will look at the English common law tradition, which began to diverge from the law of continental Europe in the middle ages, and acquired its own distinctive character.

Terms offered: Fall This is an intro to the origins, development, and expansion of European settlement on the North American mainland. Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring This course will provide an introduction to constitutional law using Israel as a case study. Terms offered: Not yet offered This class first introduces students to the origins of the access to justice problem, paying attention to disparate impacts along the lines of race, class, and gender.

It examines how the costs of legal services, and in turn of law school tuition, steadily rose in the last several decades. Drawing on both historical and comparative case studies, students will then be encouraged to think creatively about who can represent individuals at law. Further inspiration comes from contemporary case studies outside North America and Europe. Finally, students will have an opportunity to execute a guided research project on a historical, comparative, or contemporary aspect of access to justice that helps shed light on potential solutions today.

Course Objectives: Students can expect to sharpen their critical reading and writing skills. Students will learn to better express themselves orally.

Students will practice developing and executing their own research project. Topics include Progressive Era Regulatory policy, criminal justice and relations, freedom of speech and press, New Deal legal innovations, modern tort liability, environmental regulation, judicial reform, and federalism.

Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing. It is recommended that students have completed at least one course in legal studies or political science that deals with American history or American government prior to taking Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring Overview of American legal and constitutional history from colonial times to the present. Topics include colonial legal institutions, early constitutional history, history of the common law, business regulation, race and the law, history of the legal profession, and the modern constitutional order.

Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring This course will provide advanced reading and independent research in the history of American law. Preference may be given to students who have taken Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring An examination of constitutional decision-making in a number of countries based on selected high court opinions.

Terms offered: Fall , Fall , Fall Implicit bias, automatic or unconscious stereotyping, and prejudice that guides our perception of and behavior toward social groups, is a fast growing area of law and psychology.

Students will look at research in substantive areas of employment discrimination, criminal law, and questions regarding communications, voting, health care, immigration, property, and whether research findings showing unconscious gender, racial, and other biases can be used as courtroom evidence to prove discrimination.

Terms offered: Fall , Fall , Fall Psychology is the study of the human mind and its effect on behavior. Law attempts to regulate behavior through norm setting, policing, and punishment.

This course gives a survey of the natural connection between law and psychology. Here, we will study the psychology of legal systems, of crime and policing, and of what happens in the courtroom, including criminal charging, jury selection, eyewitness testimony, prosecution, and conviction.

Throughout , we will analyze the theoretical and empirical evidence as it applies generally and to special populations children, the impaired, those with mental illnesses, and racial and sexual minorities. Course Objectives: Students will be able to identify many of the psychological assumptions underlying the application of law, what evidence exists for their validity, and the areas where law fails to understand or regulate human behavior. What is the nature of legal authority?

Where does it originate? Why do we obey it? From where does law come? How are laws made? How do judges reason? We will also focus on law and conflict resolution: How do people bring cases to court? How do judges decide cases?

Are there alternatives to the legal process? Finally , a traditional conception of law is that it is a timeless set of principles, yet society is always changing. How then does law change? How do courts respond to social change? To what extent can courts bring about social change? Readings are from a variety of fields: philosophy, history, judicial opinions, and scholarly articles. Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring Course will examine concepts of race and culture, various understandings of and approaches to diversity found in the law, and the role of sociocultural structures in shaping the operation of antidiscrimination law and social policy.

Topics include: psychology of desegregation, colorblindness and equal protection, affirmative action, stereotyping, sexism in the workplace, prejudice toward immigrants, social class and poverty.

Terms offered: Spring , Fall , Spring This course explores major issues and debates in the sociology of law. Topics include theoretical perspectives on the relationship between law and society, theories of why people obey and disobey the law, the relationship between law and social norms, the "law in action" in litigation and dispute resolution, the roles of lawyers, judges, and juries in the legal system and in society, and the role of law in social change.

The course will examine these issues from an empirical perspective. Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week 8 weeks - 6 hours of lecture and 1. Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, this course introduces students to the long history of the prison in the American experience, questioning the shadows of inevitability and normality that cloak mass incarceration in the contemporary United States and around the globe.

Terms offered: Prior to Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, this course embraces the longue duree of critical prison studies, questioning the shadows of normality that cloak mass incarceration both across the globe and, more particularly, in the contemporary United States.

This course thus explores a series of visceral, unsettling juxtapositions: "freedom" and "slavery"; "citizenship" and "subjugation"; "marginalization" and "inclusion" , in each case explicating the ways that story making, political demagoguery, and racial, class, and sexual inequalities have wrought an untenable social condition. Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Summer 10 Week Session Dimensions of diversity at the heart of this course are perceptions of commonality and attributions of difference defined by race and immigration.

Emphasis is given to contemporary law and politics in the U. Course Objectives: In this course, students will learn to explore, discuss, and better understand the relationship between peoplehood and politics in a dynamic, diversifying polity. Terms offered: Spring , Summer 10 Week Session, Summer First 6 Week Session This course will explore the ways in which feminist theory has shaped conceptions of the law, as well as examine a range of feminist legal theories, including equality, difference, dominance, intersectional, poststructural, postcolonial theories.

Terms offered: Spring , Fall , Spring Advanced study in law and society with specific topics to be announced. Summer: 6 weeks - 2. Terms offered: Fall , Fall , Fall This course provides Legal Studies honors students with the opportunity to learn about the conduct of legal studies research, how to write an honors thesis proposal, and prepare for writing an honors thesis in the spring.

Terms offered: Spring , Fall , Spring Study of an advanced topic under the supervision of a faculty member leading to the completion of a senior honors thesis. Summer: 6 weeks - Terms offered: Spring , Spring , Spring The goal of the seminar is to provide students additional support as they conduct the research for and write their senior honors theses, and prepare presentations for the Spring Studies Undergraduate Research Conference.

Alternative to final exam. Terms offered: Fall , Spring , Fall Enrollment restrictions apply. Consult the Legal Studies department for more information. Prerequisites: Upper division standing. Consent of instructor and approval of Program Chairman. Summer: 6 weeks - hours of independent study per week 8 weeks - hours of independent study per week. Kathryn R. Abrams, Professor. Law, feminist jurisprudence, voting rights, constitutional law.

Research Profile. Catherine R. Albiston, Professor. Inequality, social change, law, employment, legal profession, public interest law, gender discrimination. Kenneth A. Bamberger, Professor.

Technology, government regulations, corporate compliance. China, law, contracts, Chinese law. Robert D. Cooter, Professor. Economic development, constitutional law, private law. Meir Dan-Cohen, Professor. Criminal law, legal philosophy, moral philosophy, organizations, bureaucracy.

Lauren Edelman, Professor. Work organizations, legal environments, civil rights laws, workers' rights. Malcolm M. Feeley, Professor. Criminal law, punishment, social policy. Kinch Hoekstra, Associate Professor. History of political, moral, and legal philosophy, ancient, renaissance, and early modern political thought. Christopher Kutz, Professor. Criminal law, moral, legal and political philosophy.

Taeku Lee, Professor. Political science, discrimination, language, social movements, political behavior, identity, racial and ethnic politics, public opinion, survey research methods, social welfare policies, partisanship, stereotypes. David Lieberman, Professor. Legal history, legal theory, comparative legal theory.

Kristin Luker, Professor. Social policy, jurisprudence. Laurent Mayali, Professor. European legal history, comparative law, medieval jurisprudence, customary law. Justin Mccrary, Professor. Statistics, law and economics, labor economics, business law. Calvin Morrill, Professor. Dylan Penningroth, Professor.

African American and U. Victoria Plaut, Professor. Jonathan S. Simon, Professor. Punishment, social policy, risk, mass incarceration, reentry. Sarah Song, Professor. Gender, race, citizenship, multiculturalism, immigration law and politics. Rachel Stern, Assistant Professor.

Courts, authoritarian states, globalization, China. Eric Stover, Adjunct Professor. Eric L. Talley, Professor. Economic analysis of law, corporate law, securities regulation, law and financial markets. Christopher Lawrence Tomlins, Professor. Legal history and the history and law of slavery. Leti Volpp, Professor.

Citizenship, law and culture, identity especially race and gender , immigration and migration, Asian American studies. John Yoo, Professor. Constitutional law, international law, foreign affairs. Franklin E. Study the role of the paralegal in civil litigation.

Build foundational knowledge of the legal profession. Gain practical skills and apply legal concepts while conducting research and evaluating legal sources. Certain courses are available to nondegree-seeking students. Upon successful completion of a course, you may transfer the credits earned toward a degree at Purdue Global if the course is part of the Purdue Global degree program. Develop a better understanding of the law and legal principles that affect your career goals or interests.

Enjoy small classes taught by industry professionals. Legal expertise can pave the way for leaders in health care, IT, business, finance, criminal justice, education, and other professions to make a much bigger impact. This valuable experience can help set you apart in the job market.

Experience a Purdue Global undergraduate program for an introductory 3-week period. We offer multiple start dates to give you flexibility in your education, life, and work schedules.

Tuition reductions are also available for graduate programs and military spouses. Title IV federal financial aid is available for many of our degree programs.