The History Department regularly offers a Graduate Seminar in Legal History, open to PhD students in History as well as graduate students in other programs and departments. Below are descriptions of past courses with links to syllabi.

Legal History (syllabus [Ahmed], syllabus [Vorenberg])

HIST 2980B Section S01, CRN 25632

Spring 2020

Professors Faiz Ahmed and Michael Vorenberg

Course Description:

This graduate seminar has three purposes. First, by reading selected secondary works from a variety of periods and places, you will be introduced to some of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the writing of any sort of history—cultural, political, or social—that uses legal sources. Second, by dipping into a variety of legal sources from a variety of periods and places, we will be introduced to some of the practical issues and challenges facing the historian who uses such sources, challenges that you will face as you move toward constructing your own research paper. Third, by writing either a historiographical essay, or a research paper prospectus that contains a historiographical section, you will be prepared to produce a scholarly essay similar to the many scholarly essays that we will read in this course. The readings of the first half of the course are set in advance, whereas the readings in the second half are determined by students’ specific interests. Students will play a role in running discussions, especially during those weeks in which their special interest is the topic.

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Legal History: Methods and Approaches in Comparative Perspective (Syllabus)

HIST 2981P Section S01, CRN 24906

Spring 2018

Professor Faiz Ahmed

Course Description:

This graduate seminar explores what it means to research and write legal history—broadly construed and incorporating the overlapping fields of constitutional history, sociolegal history, and law and society studies. After select canonical readings across geographic and chronological fields, we turn to cutting edge work by current scholars on topics including, inter alia, social histories of law, legal cultures, and legal institutions; religion and secular authority; race, gender, family, and legality; international law, the laws of war, and human rights; and comparative/transnational approaches to justice and the rule of law. Open to graduate students pursuing questions of law and society or the history of legal ideas and institutions, this seminar seeks diverse interpretive methods and approaches to legal history, including but not limited to the use of court records. A highlight of the seminar are class visits by distinguished historians at Brown specializing in one or more of the aforesaid topics and/or methodologies, across different time periods and regions of the world.