For a complete list of course offerings in Law and Humanities, including full descriptions and faculty who will be teaching the offerings in 2008-2009, refer to the online Curriculum Guide.
When the humanities were created as separate disciplines in fourteenth-century Italy, the studia humanitatis, they were meant as both an aid and a challenge to the already established professional subjects of theology, medicine and law. That is still the case today. There are essentially two missions in the courses of the Law School that fall under this subject. The first and more technical goal is to strengthen the forms of thought and writing that students bring to legal subjects through the study of rhetoric, criticism, grammar and argument. This aspect of the subject focuses on the general nature of language and how to use it more effectively in a legal context. The second goal is to widen a student's horizons on legal subjects through the use of history, imaginative works of literature and moral philosophy. Liberal studies, so defined, came originally from the word liber, meaning free person. The assumption behind the definition has always been that only individuals capable of independent thought are truly free of the limitations around them. The ultimate goal, then, of Law and Humanities is to prepare students of law to think ofr themselves and to bring their own originality to bear on the problems that they will encounter in their professional lives.
