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Category Archives: Teaching

Draft Syllabus: “Social Justice and Human Rights”

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

I’ll be teaching a second-year lecture course entitled LAWS 2105 Social Justice and Human Rights this summer. I’ve described the course as follows: This course presents a critical examination of the concept of human rights focusing upon debates internal to the idea of human rights (i.e., that they are not in themselves universal), that historical [...]

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Teaching Evaluations (Fall 2010)

Saturday, March 5, 2011

I just received the written comments submitted by my students from LAWS 3005 Law and Regulation and LAWS 3908 Approaches in Legal Studies II, both taught in the Fall 2010 semester. The university where I teach uses what is perhaps the crudest of all forms of teaching evaluations: students are asked to answer thirteen questions [...]

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New Doctoral Program in Legal Studies

Monday, January 10, 2011

Some readers–especially any undergraduates and M.A. students–may be interested in the following announcement from the Department of Law at Carleton University (where I teach) regarding a new doctoral program in legal studies [pdf]: Carleton University is pleased to announce the establishment of the Ph.D. in Legal Studies. Pending approval of the Ontario Council on Graduate [...]

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CI/TA Strike at Carleton

Friday, November 19, 2010

Update November 20: as of 4:03PM, CUPE 4600 (Unit 1) representing the TAs and the university have reached a tentative agreement, the details of which will not be publicized until the agreement is ratified by the membership and the senate. The union, however, denies that any agreement has been reached, that negotiations continue and that [...]

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Mini-Course Proposal

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Proposal for a week long “mini-course” to be offered to high school students in the spring: “How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse, Or What Edward Cullen Has To Do With The Hamburger On Your Plate” Societies, including our own, are largely structured by violence, which tends to remain invisible. However, in periods of crisis, this [...]

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Assignments

Sunday, November 7, 2010

It is my general impression that the students I get, at least, have rarely–if ever–read a book cover to cover (and certainly not for pleasure). Obviously, as good as the Harry Potter and Twilight books are, they don’t count. For both my first year seminar (“Power and Violence”) and my third legal methods course (on [...]

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2010-2011 Course Outlines

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

This year I am teaching three courses: FYSM 1506 Topics in the Study of Societies: “Power and Violence” [pdf]–this course will focus, in the semester, on social and political theories of violence and its relation to society and, in the second semester, on a variety of “substantive” topics, drawing upon movies, fiction, and television. LAWS [...]

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Fall 2009/Winter 2010 Syllabi

Thursday, July 30, 2009

For those interested, I have posted the syllabi for my two courses: FYSM 1502 B Topics in Legal Studies: Animals, The Environment and the Law [pdf] FYSM 1502 P Topics in Legal Studies: State, Law and Violence [pdf] Both courses are first year seminars, meaning that enrollment is capped at thirty students in the B [...]

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Animal Studies and Evil

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary “Death on a Factory Farm” (if HBO asks “HBO Canada or HBO USA,” choose the [...]

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The Animals Class

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

As those who bothered to read my admittedly boring last post may have noticed, I’m in the midst of doing the final administrative and organizational matters for the “Enriched Mini-Course” I am teaching in early May. Among the various activities (it is supposed to be “hands-on”) I had wanted the students (mostly grade eight) to [...]

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