Courses Threads allow Berkeley undergraduates to explore intellectual themes connecting courses across departments and disciplines. Without creating new majors or minors, Course Threads highlight connections among existing courses and help students develop a breadth and depth of knowledge in particular topics. Course Threads have been developed by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and are sponsored by several departments on campus. The Rhetoric department sponsors the Law & Humanities Course Thread.
To complete a Course Thread, students simply enroll in at least three courses tagged in the course catalog as part of a particular Course Thread, such as Human Rights, Human-Centered Design, Sciences & Society, Law & Humanities, Carceral Geographies: Beyond the Prison, and more.
Students may then participate in an RRR week Course Threads Symposium at the Townsend Center’s Geballe Room (220 Stephens Hall) and give a ten-minute presentation about their experience with their Course Thread’s theme to receive a Certificate of Completion. (Students may receive only one certificate per semester.)
Law & Humanities
Understanding what justice demands requires struggling with basic questions of form, history, interpretation, memory, emotion, and value that are sometimes given short shrift in more empirically oriented approaches to law. This Course Thread makes participants aware of the importance of the humanities in relation to questions of law and literature, law and history, law and philosophy, law and music, and law and the visual arts. Through this Thread, students consider what law is and where it resides. By including departments across the humanities and the social sciences, the Course Thread allows students to interrogate formal texts of law as well as the intellectual and cultural contexts through which law has become the complex practice and knowledge that it is.
Requirements
Successfully complete 3 courses (from at least two different departments).
A provisional list of courses can be found here
Students interested in the Law & Humanities Course Thread or have questions about whether a class you would like to take qualifies, contact Professor Marianne Constable (constable@berkeley.edu).