LEHR Curriculum

LEHR Approaches Seminars introduce students to ways of studying the value systems articulated by the world’s various legal traditions, philosophies, and religions throughout history. Based upon interdisciplinary and cross-cultural inquiries, students will explore the search for meaning and purpose in different societies and cultures, and critically reflect upon the development of different governmental, legal, economic, and religious systems. Courses may contextualize the methods and theories under consideration by examining cases of social progress and decline, conflicts, revolutions, and other changes throughout history. Instructors will introduce selective approaches and methodologies from various fields and disciplines including history, philosophy, political science, psychology, law, religious studies, and other social and behavioral sciences to explore synergistic possibilities for analyzing the values of institutions, movements, groups, and individuals. Students will learn how various forms of knowledge and power complement, depend on, or conflict with each other in an increasingly connected world. We will ask how global perspectives can change traditional approaches to fields of knowledge, and we will encourage attentiveness to broad questions often neglected by more narrow discipline-specific concerns, e.g., how religion serves or impedes prospects for peace, how the enforcement of anti-bribery laws changes cultures, how the use of confession and torture reflects ideological conceptions of race, class, and gender.

Sample Courses:

• Global Corporate Citizenship: Historic, Philosophic, and Legal Approaches
• Comparative Global Legal Traditions
• Soul, Self, Mind: A Global Perspective

Based on the particular expertise of individual faculty members, LEHR Global Topics Seminars afford students the opportunity to examine the nature of philosophical, religious, legal, and ethical beliefs and norms by focusing on particular themes, e.g., war, same-sex sexuality, global economic, political, and cultural convergence. Drawing on the broader multi-disciplinary intersection of history, sociology, philosophy, legal studies, environmental studies, LGBT studies, women’s studies, and religious studies, LEHR faculty are encouraged to design seminars that provide insight into the historical evolution of specific normative traditions and problems across cultures and societies. Philosophical conceptions of moral responsibilities, religious beliefs and doctrines, legal and juridical philosophies, and their intersections with ideas of gender, race and class, may be put into play with social institutions, movements and states to analyze issues of concern to students. Students will develop the necessary skills to do original and unique research and contribute to social change. The broad, interdisciplinary questions that emerge from the study of these topics should enhance their experience at global sites in their junior year.

Sample Courses:

• Policing Same-Sex Desire: A Legal and Social History
• Globalism and You: A Contemporary History of the Present
• A World at War

This online course creates a virtual community of learning for LEHR  juniors spread globally across all GLS sites.  Students will work toward their LEHR senior thesis project by reflecting on their junior year abroad in ways that integrate their academic work and experiential learning.  Students will also write a thesis prospectus and an annotated bibliography in communication with their LEHR peers at other GLS sites as well as their faculty instructor in New York.

Through the use of a multidisciplinary approach including theoretical models of legal interpretation, historic and historiographic methods, informal and formal logical analysis, empirical and archival research, thought experiment, close textual reading and more, LEHR seniors build on work begun in their previous years in GLS. Particular emphasis is placed on using the experiential learning and other research resulting from their junior year abroad. With the goal of the senior thesis being an original piece of scholarship setting up the pursuit of various careers and/or further education, the methodologies employed in LEHR are those with a proven track record in producing the best undergraduate work.

Criteria of Excellence

An excellent senior thesis in the Law, Ethics, History, and Religion (LEHR) Concentration has several essential characteristics. It is first of all an argument, with a clear thesis supported by credible evidence and cogent reasoning. An excellent thesis offers an innovative insight into an issue rather than simply summarizing others’ opinions; however, it does include a literature review based on a student’s engagement with the wider scholarship on the topic.

Like any GLS thesis, an LEHR thesis is informed by, or can contribute to, contemporary discussions of a global issue. Being aware of critical global perspectives and utilizing various kinds of sources, whether primary, secondary, in English or other languages, will hopefully grow from the student’s junior year experience.

Accordingly, students are strongly encouraged to use a multidisciplinary approach, drawn from at least two of the concentration’s areas (law, ethics, history, and religion), incorporate global perspectives (i.e., a transnational focus, including/comparing at least two of the following categories: international organizations, nation-states, empires, kingdoms, city-states, etc.), and reference the student’s experiential learning. 

LEHR does not permit the submission of large-scale, stand-alone creative projects (the “creative thesis with process document” option). LEHR does permit the submission of a “written thesis with creative component” as long as the creative component consists of a creative presentation and does not extend to creative methodology. See the distinction between a “creative presentation” and “creative methodology,” here.

A creative presentation may supplement (but not replace) a written LEHR thesis. Examples of creative presentation include (but are not limited to) a website, slide show, primary source translations, and short samples of fictional writing (poems, short stories, or screenplays) that showcase the research findings of the senior thesis.