The mission of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University (CSLC) is to facilitate interdisciplinary study, research and scholarship on the intersections of law and culture.
Starting from the twin premises that law is a cultural form and that culture carries the regulative force of legal practices and norms, the CSLC seeks to advance a wide range of work in law and culture studies. Embracing an expansive definition of culture as a concept whose boundaries range from the aesthetic to the political, the CSLC supports projects that understand law in a strict institutional or positivist sense, as well as those that approach law more generally as a regime for ordering social life, constructing cultural meaning and shaping group and individual identities.
Khiara M. Bridges CLS '02, Ph.D. 2008 does a reading forHuman Rights: Culture, a Seminar Performance Project sponsored by the Center.
CLSC projects emanate from the understanding that law can no longer be adequately analyzed as though it were exogenous to the realm of culture. In keeping with its broad mandate, the CSLC offers an intellectual home for teaching, research and scholarship across disciplines.
