Law, Religion and Culture Home
New Scholarly Works
Faculty
Relevant Courses
Videos & Media
Faculty Workshops
Law and Buddhism Project
Institute for Jewish Thought and Heritage
Links:
The Immanent Frame
Frequencies
Politics of Religious Freedom
Religion and Diversity Project
Religion and Ethics News (PBS)
Religion Dispatches
Religion in American History
States of Devotion Blog
UB Philosophy Department
Program in Law, Religion and Culture
University at Buffalo Law School
O'Brian Hall, North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
Email Us

Relevant Courses

The list below represents an example of UB Law courses and seminars focusing on the intersection of law, religion, society and culture.

Courses Offered Fall 2010

Courses Offered Spring 2010

Other Courses of Interest

Course Descriptions

L-710 CULTURAL HERITAGE & THE LAW- Nils Olsen

This course is an interdisciplinary offering, taught in the Law School curriculum, but, in addition to Law Students, available to selected graduate students in Arts Management, Anthropology, Classics, and others, with permission of the instructor. The course materials include Merryman, Elsen and Ulrice, Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts, Fifth Edition (2007) and published in paperback by Kluwer Law International. This text will be available in the University Bookstore.

Topics to be considered include; Plunder, reparations, and destruction of cultural property in times of both international and internal (civil war) armed conflicts; the international trade of items of cultural heritage and property; legal and moral ownership of antiquities; the reparation of cultural property from former colonial states to the source nations of origin; ethical guides, best practices, and peer pressure applications to inform museum acquisition and scientific and educational study of antiquities and cultural heritage; and the legal requirements of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) as it applies to the acquisition of Native American cultural heritage, anthropological materials, and human remains by governmentally-assisted institutions in the United States. e instructor only.

L-735 RELIGION, FAMILY LAW, AND CULTURE - Nadia Shahram

State law governs family and matrimonial laws in the United States, but religion and culture play a major role in the personal codes which influences the behavior of citizens. The Quran offers a religious textual body of laws for students to study in comparison to US state laws, and to examine it as a controlling influence over the lives of American Moslems. The body of Islamic Law, or Shari’s, is central to the understanding of Moslems living in Western society.

This course will provide students with an opportunity to examine the legal status of women before and after marriage, as daughters, wives and mothers in Muslim and Hindu societies in Iran, India, as well as other Eastern countries. The personal codes and family laws that deal with marriage, polygamy, divorce, inheritance, and the custody of children are issues that are at the core of Islamic traditional life and influence Muslims in every society.

L-589 LEGAL REGULATION OF RELIGION –Winnifred Sullivan

This seminar will consider the ways in which religion is regulated in the modern context below the level of the Constitution. We will be examining legal materials from the U.S., as well as other countries, with a view to understanding how religion is being shaped through this legal regulation. Research paper required.

L -866 LAW, LAND, AND THE ENVIRONMENT- Irus Braverman

Nature, as the Welsh scholar Raymond Williams remarked, is one of the most complex words in the language. Similarly, the terms "landscape" and "environment" take on a wide, at times contradictory, range of meanings. This seminar will explore several such meanings and inquire into the relationship between them and the law. It will include analysis of various ecological approaches as well as discussions on the idea of wilderness and the American frontier, the naturalization of the Native American, animal and tree rights, and other "natural" concerns. In the last part of the seminar we will discuss power relations in various landscapes and environments, including tree logging in East Asia and land struggles over tree planting and uprooting in Israel and Palestine.

L-591 LAW, CULTURE, AND AMERICAN FILM – Teresa Miller

This course introduces "visual literacy" skills to law students who will enter a profession characterized by an increasingly visual and narrative culture, distinct from the "paradigmatic" text-bound, analytic culture of law school. This course uses films to provide a unique mechanism for structured critical reflection on the dynamics of legal cultural storytelling. It will improve students’ ability to critically read narratives and text, as well as visual media. This year, students will participate in researching the legal history of Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York case (argued by UB Law Professor Lucinda Finley before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996) and constructing a narrative of the "abortion wars" in Buffalo, NY.

L- 549 LAW AND CULTURE - Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

This seminar introduces fundamental concerns in the anthropological study of law. Topics include: the relationship between 'law' and 'culture' as concepts of social order; the diversity of forms that legal phenomena have assumed in different societies; the constitution of legal order in modern colonial and postcolonial settings; and the fascinating challenges that arise from efforts to make the law responsive to cultural difference in contemporary contexts. Readings are both ethnographic and theoretical.

L-636 RELIGION AND THE CONSTITUTION - Stephanie Phillips

What is the role of religion in our constitutional order? Do the First Amendment Religion Clauses constitute propositions about the features of good religion? If not, that is, if the First Amendment Religion Clauses specify only what government’s conduct toward religion shall be, then do the Religion Clauses succeed in formulating a stance of neutrality concerning religion? What kind of neutrality? And what about the differential impact that supposedly neutral government policies have upon various religious traditions and beliefs? To approach answers to these and related questions, the course thoroughly explores Establishment Clause and Free Exercise case law, supplemented by materials representing historical and theological perspectives. Seminar credit is available.

L-649 POWER, PRIVILEGE, AND LAW – Athena Mutua

This course will explore the role of law in creating, maintaining and possibly disrupting various hierarchies of power and privilege. Specifically, it will analyze the legal strategies and rhetorical techniques courts have used in deciding civil rights cases involving issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, and disability. It will also explore the social context in which courts rendered these decisions and discuss whether they would be decided differently today. Close readings of the cases reveal that many of the assumptions and techniques used reproduce patterns of privilege and disadvantage. While this is so, this course posits that they also provide possible avenues for liberatory practice?

L-591 LAW, CULTURE AND AMERICAN FILM - Teresa Miller

This course introduces "visual literacy" skills to law students who will enter a profession characterized by an increasingly visual and narrative culture, distinct from the "paradigmatic" text-bound, analytic culture of law school. This course uses films to provide a unique mechanism for structured critical reflection on the dynamics of legal cultural storytelling. It will improve students’ ability to critically read narratives and text, as well as visual media. This year, students will participate in researching the legal history of Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York case (argued by UB Law Professor Lucinda Finley before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996) and constructing a narrative of the "abortion wars" in Buffalo, NY.