AP/SOSC 3370 6.00

Section A & B Social Justice And Law

Where once “social justice” was strictly a term of laudable progressivism, in recent years it has gone to one of occasional ridicule, with pejoratives like “social justice warrior” meant to discredit and dismiss those advocating on behalf of social change as superficial and unrealistic thinkers. Responding to this challenge, this course seeks to re-legitimize quests for social justice by taking seriously and investigating deeply the issues, aims, and claims that variously fall today under the heading of “social justice” by placing them in relation to the institution through which
justice is purported to be achieved: law. Through engagement with academic literature, it seriously poses the questions: What do so-called “social justice warriors” want from law? Which of these issues, aims, and claims are tenable in law’s terms? And which ones win out when tensions between them arise?

To answer these questions, this course combines abstract theories of law and justice with concrete social issues of our time. In particular, it seeks to unearth how concepts originating in legal contexts have been taken up in wider social justice discourse, to map out the realistic limits of new and emerging social justice claims, and to examine the tensions that emerge within and between specific social justice struggles.