Undergraduate Courses

Legal Studies Course Schedules

FALL 2024

WINTER 2025


Legal Studies (LAW) and Conflict Resolution (CRES) Courses

course

description

LAW 101

Intro to US Law: Surveys United States legal system: presents structure and methods of the legal system and fundamentals of several substantive areas of law.

LAW 102

Intro to Criminal Law: Explores criminal law and statutes using primary and secondary sources.

LAW 103

Intro to Criminal Investigation: Examines the constitutional limitations on police officers’ authority to detain suspects, search them and their property, and interrogate them.

LAW 104

Intro to Business Law: Examines the context of everyday commerce, shaped by contract, tort, business entity, and securities law, to uncover how the law both affects and is affected by business.

LAW 201

Intro to Environmental Law and Policy: An introduction to environmental policy and law, with an overview of major themes and the regulatory framework. Focuses on community resilience.

LAW 202

Intro to Public International Law: An introduction to the origins, application, and main actors in international law, international institutions, and international legal processes.

LAW 203

Controversies in Constitutional Law: In-depth examination of five to seven landmark Supreme Court cases over the course of the term, spending three to four class sessions on each case.

LAW 204

Immigration and Citizenship: Interdisciplinary study of the way in which the American legal order has constituted citizenship.

LAW 250

Legal Research: Students investigate sources of law and sharpen analytical skills using issues arising in everyday life and scenarios requiring legal information to develop critical legal information literacy skills. *2 credits

LAW 301

Youth and Social Change: Explore how adults act on youth through law, mass media, policy, and social science, while investigating youth as agents of change, acting on their own perspective of law and justice.

LAW 304

American Law and Families: Examines the family through a legal lens: the rules that affect legal relationships among family members and laws related to family property.

LAW 305

Contracts in Society: Examines business deals as tools that shape personal and social realities, including related power dynamics and the nuances and limits of language.

LAW 310

Environmental Regulations: Provides students with an understanding of laws regulating activities that affect the environment as well as the skills to analyze and apply these laws to current issues.

LAW 410

Asylum and Refugee Law: This course traces fundamentals and ongoing developments in asylum and refugee law through historical and international contexts. 

LAW 410

Cannabis Law: Explores the history and current state of marijuana regulation, related federal criminal laws, legal arguments for and against state control on this issue, and the mechanics of Oregon's regulatory system.

LAW 410

First Amendment Tensions: This course introduces civil rights and liberties issues arising from the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

LAW 410

Hard Cases [Topics]: This course closely analyzes a landmark Supreme Court case (or group of interrelated cases), situating the case and its legal arguments within a broader legal, political and historical context. 

LAW 410

Legal Communication: This course will introduce students to common strategies, tools, and methods various actors, including lawyers, activists, judges and scholars, use to communicate about law. 

LAW 410

Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication: In this course, students will investigate sources of law, engage in effective research techniques, and sharpen analytical skills. 

LAW 410

Media Representation of Law, Justice, and the Legal Profession [Topics]: This course delves into the diverse depictions of law in popular culture (within one selected genre of media), offering students the opportunity to critically evaluate what these portrayals reveal about the legal system and society's expectations of justice. 

LAW 410

Roles of a Diplomat: Students learn about diplomats and diplomatic practice in international conflict situations.

LAW 410

Sports, Law, and Society: This course analyzes sports as a site for debating rights, citizenship, equality, and belonging. Examining the relationship between law, culture and politics, we study sports as a site for strategies of legal and social change and the bureaucratic administration of identity classifications, including gender.

LAW 415

Human Rights, Law, and Culture: The history, theory, and practice of human rights from a global perspective.

LAW 416

Transitional Justice: Historical and theoretical overview of the conflicts and international mechanisms, with a focus on cultural, historical, and legal forces that shape post-conflict peace-building efforts.

LAW 417

The Death Penalty: Explores the use of capital punishment in the United States, focusing on the law governing the death penalty, in the context of the criminal justice system, social science and policy.

LAW 418

Race and the Courts: This course explores the issue of race within American law and jurisprudence through historical and contemporary contexts. Students will gain an understanding of how claims about responsibility, community, rationality, equality, justice, and democracy have been used to justify or resist racial segregation, integration, access, and expulsion. 

LAW 419

Legal Secrets: Examines the different types of information that the law designates as “secret”. 

CRES 101

Intro to Conflict Resolution: Explores up-to-date conflict management theories and practical steps to communicate effectively in sensitive situations.

CRES 410

Environmental Conflict Resolution: Students learn and critically examine methods of environmental conflict resolution, including conflict assessment, negotiation, decision-making, adaptive management, collaboration, and public participation. 

CRES 410

Managing Conflict in Organizations: Prepares students to assist in managing disputes within organization. Students will receive a basic introduction to organizational context, and strucure, leadership and communication styles, and sources of workplace disputes. The course also provides an overview of the processes by which organizations typically resolve disputes. 

CRES 410

Psychology of Conflict: Examines the psychological sources, nature, and functions of conflict, covering multiple levels of analysis relevant to intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup conflict. 

CRES 410

Russia's War on Ukraine: We explore some of the initial lessons from Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine by considering various questions through different (sometimes overlapping) prisims: history, IR theory, the law of war, the impact of nuclear weapons, potential endgame scenarios, and the war's impact on possible future conflicts.

CRES 415

Conflict and Gender: Focuses on the multiple relationships among conflict, violence, and gender in situations of warfare, militarization, and peacemaking.

CRES 420

Restorative Justice: Provides a critical introduction to the principles and practices of restorative justice.

CRES 430

Working Internationally: The theoretical, historical, socio-political, and practical contexts of working, volunteering, doing internships and field research internationally.

CRES 435

Israel and Palestine: Examination of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. Evolution of the political struggle with a broad look at the human side of conflict, and examination of critical negotiation issues.

CRES 440

Dialogue Across Difference I: Introduction to processes and facilitation of discourse and dialogue, with special emphasis on participation. Sequence with CRES 441. *2 credits

CRES 441

Dialogue Across Difference II: Advanced course in dialogic processes and facilitation, with special emphasis on context. Sequence with CRES 440. *2 credits

CRES 445

Conflicts of Incarceration: Issues of crime, incarceration, and justice within the Western context.