For a complete list of course offerings in Law and Social Sciences, including full descriptions and faculty who will be teaching the offerings in 2008-2009, refer to the online Curriculum Guide.
The Columbia Law School curriculum in Law and Social Sciences provides students with analytic tools that are essential in the modern practice of law and the development of legal theory. From its earliest appearance in American courts in 1655, when one Dr. Brown offered his "scientific" opinion that a group of crime victims had been bewitched by the accused, scientific evidence has been a basic tool in litigation and legal analysis. The role of social science in law has evolved, over the centuries, and its role in the analysis of both legislative and adjudicative facts has influenced the evolution of case law and jurisprudential theory. Social science had had significant impacts on the federal rules of evidence, and is now widely used in formulating litigation strategy. Contemporary issues in constitutional law, public policy and regulation, and the adjudication of a wide range of civil and criminal questions, have relied extensively on social science evidence. In the courses in this area of the curriculum, for example, we examine how social science can explain whether trademark or copyright infringement has occurred, the extent and severity of damages in complex tort cases, the determination of community standards in obscenity cases, the accuracy of syndrome claims in criminal law, the validity of equal protection claims in discrimination cases, and the impacts of election law and redistricting.
Despite its now common use in several domains of legal analysis, scientific evidence poses fundamental issues and recurring challenges for the law. How does social science evidence inform casual inference? What is its role in adjudicating factual claims? When and how can social science be applied to adjudicate constitutional questions? When is this evidence reliable and under what standards? When are these facts relevant and how shall they be weighed by fact finders? Does legal analysis using the tools of social science lead to different conclusions than might a doctrinal analysis?
The courses in law and social science provide a foundation in empirical analysis that complements doctrinal analysis in law. Courses in this area equip students to understand and critique complex scientific evidence from the behavioral and social sciences, and to develop strategies to construct scientific evidence for litigation strategy, regulation, policy analysis, and the development of legal theory. Courses including Ahthropology and the Law, Law and Social Science, Statistics for Lawyers, Foundations of the Regulatory State and Law and Economics train students to use social science to address fundamental questions in torts, constitutional law, gender and racial discrimination and critical questions in criminal and civil procedure. In addition to courses in this area, students have unique opportunities to acquire and apply training through a variety of seminars.
