Social and Legal Philosophy

PHIL 302 asks the foundational question of when law actually obligates you and when the state's claim on your behavior runs out — working through the natural-law vs. positivism debate, theories of rights, the harm principle, and how all of this scales up to war and intervention. Most of the work is reading dense primary texts (Schauer & Sinnott-Armstrong's anthology) and producing a term essay plus a final essay where you have to defend a position, not just summarize one. As a senior-year required course it pulls together the ethics and political philosophy you've already seen and pushes you to apply it to concrete legal cases, which is why it doubles as solid preparation for anyone heading toward law school or graduate work in normative theory.