The following syllabus is for “Philosophy and the Law,” a course I teach in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alabama. UA’s Philosophy Department has three concentrations (Jurisprudence, Mind-Brain, and Philosophy and Medicine), and this is an introductory course (200-level) in the Jurisprudence Concentration.
Philosophy and the Law were part of the curriculum when I arrived at UA in 2020. The goal of the course is to introduce students to philosophical problems and law, historically with an emphasis on general jurisprudence (the nature of law). Although I briefly introduce some of the classic debates about the nature of law (e.g., H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin), I spend more time on special jurisprudence (philosophical analysis of specific areas of law).
I focus on specific areas of law for a couple of reasons. General jurisprudence tends to seem a bit dry to many students who are new to legal philosophy. Sure, “What is law?” is an important question, but it is not one that most first and second-year students are typically prepared (or willing) to discuss for an entire semester. Frankly, I myself would prefer to move on to more applied, practical problems in law. The focus on philosophical analysis of specific areas of law is more palatable—even exciting—to my students, many of whom are planning to attend law school.
My goal was to use an engaging book—not a textbook—and I settled on Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. This is an admittedly idiosyncratic text to use in an introductory legal philosophy course, but the material provides a nice overview of many important philosophical problems in law: the “reasonable man” doctrine, criminal sentencing, the harm principle, obscenity, and pornography, along with how these problems relate to emotions such as shame and disgust. Although the book was written in 2004, topics such as the connection between law, moral panics, and stigmatization are timely.
I supplement the text with several “doctrinal digressions” over the course of the semester. These are weeks in which I assign case briefs in specific areas of law, such as tort, property, contract, and criminal law. During these weeks, we do more black letter law (e.g., the element of negligence, and the elements of a contract), and then relate the law to philosophical issues that have been raised in the course. This gives the professor some flexibility to draw on different cases.
The course uses a variety of assessments, including weekly journal posts on the reading (question prompts are on the syllabus), short presentations (or panel discussions depending on class sizes), and two very short essays in which students must display a method of legal reasoning (analogical and deductive). I also give two open book/note exams that are a mix of short answer, essay, multiple choice, and true/false questions. Many of the exam questions follow a law school exam format in which students are given a hypothetical scenario and must apply the law (and philosophical analysis) to the facts.
All in all, this course tends to be an enjoyable one (for both me and the students), covering a wide range of interesting material about the law.
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Luke William Hunt
Luke William Hunt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, where he teaches in the department's Jurisprudence Track. After graduating from law school, he was a law clerk for a federal judge in Virginia. He then worked as an FBI Special Agent in Virginia and Washington, D.C., followed by his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing (Oxford, 2019), The Police Identity Crisis: Hero, Warrior, Guardian, Algorithm (Routledge, 2021), and Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying (Oxford, 2024).
I wonder if you find the framing of the moral around ‘disgust’ to be helpful for students. I have been thinking about a similar intro-phil-and-law syllabus (job market, woohoo) and would be more inclined towards Feinberg’s taxonomy. But I also do, intuitively, think that students have a better prior grasp on it means to be disgusted as to motivate the moral question.
Oh, and thank you for sharing this!