About the Program in Law, Politics, and Society
The Law, Politics and Society program offers students an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex interactions of law, culture, economics, politics, and social structure. Situated firmly within a liberal arts education, the program does not treat law as a fixed, naturally given feature of social life, or as a professional practice reserved for specialists such as lawyers, judges, and legislators. Instead, the program understands law, as a pervasive part of everyday life, to be socially constructed and contested.
As LPS majors, students will take courses from a wide variety of departments and faculty at Drake, with ample opportunities to integrate their interdisciplinary learning into an understanding of the larger field of sociolegal studies. From introductory courses in the major, to small topical seminars on topics as diverse as constitutional interpretation, human rights and international law, and reproductive law and politics, students will encounter a range of ways to study and understand the complex interactions of law, politics, and society in a globalizing, multicultural, and dynamic world. They will take these understandings with them into internships and experiential learning opportunities, and later into jobs, graduate school, and professional education.
In this major students will:
- participate actively in their communities;
- read and understand legal texts, court decisions, and theoretical writing, and use those texts effectively to convey complex ideas and arguments in writing;
- know and articulate the difference between law as a professional practice and law as a topic of liberal arts inquiry;
- demonstrate awareness of how issues of justice, morality, authority, order, legitimacy, individualism, and community create tensions within ordered social life;
- explain how historical development and different cultural practices, social organizations, and political systems affect law and justice around the world;
- examine how factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and religion impact legal, social, and political life;
- deploy contemporary legal, critical, and interpretive theories in their own analyses of political, social, or legal events or situations.
