Emphasis in Law, Society and Culture
The newly established Emphasis in Law, Society and Culture (“LSC Emphasis”) offers an advanced graduate curriculum that includes students and faculty from the Schools of Humanities, Law, Social Ecology and Social Sciences.The LSC Emphasis aims to create transdisciplinary communities of emerging socio-legal scholars whose intellectual development is enhanced by formal and informal exchange across diverse fields. LSC scholars will explore and develop theoretical and empirical models to analyze and critique the role of law in legal, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. In addition to introducing new literatures, posing new questions and fostering creative approaches to longstanding problems, this interdisciplinary emphasis will force attention on the character of legal knowledge itself and make possible richer and more productive techniques for addressing a subject — law — not at the core of any one field.
Who Can Apply
Students enrolled in any UCI graduate or professional program, including the Law School, are eligible to apply to the Emphasis in Law, Society and Culture in the spring of either their first or second year of study, for admission to the following academic year’s cohort.
How the Program Works
Curriculum will be taught by faculty from the Schools of Humanities, Law, Social Ecology and Social Sciences. The program will comprise four interconnected components:
- A yearlong theory and research seminar, with each quarter taught by one faculty member from a different school at UCI
- Cross-disciplinary mentorship and advising
- Ongoing professionalization opportunities and responsibilities
- A culminating intellectual project
The emphasis will provide students enrolled in interdisciplinary programs with solid connections to disciplinary departments. Each student will be assigned a faculty mentor outside of his/her home department and will meet with that mentor on a monthly basis to discuss the student’s ongoing research.
Three quarter-long seminars will focus on the following core questions:
- What is the relationship between law, society and culture?
- How can disciplines inform the study of the interdisciplinary field of law, society and culture? How can disciplinary questions be broadened to engage interdisciplinary contexts? Conversely, how can interdisciplinary questions engage disciplinary contexts?
- What methods can be applied to studying law, society and culture?
- How do categories of reasoning manifest in law and in other disciplines? What is theory? What is evidence? What constitutes an argument? How is data interpreted in different disciplines?
More information on the LSC Emphasis >