Hampshire College

Recognizing that law, legal processes, and concepts are integrally involved in political, social, environmental, economic, scientific, and other issues, Hampshire College has given legal studies a significant place in its curriculum.

Our pioneering Law Program, established in 1970, was the first undergraduate legal studies program in the nation. It offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the study of law, as well as a number of exciting opportunities for engaging legal questions outside the classroom.

Some students choose to focus primarily on law, while others include legal perspectives as a secondary focus. Advanced students create concentrations in which law interacts with their interests in philosophy, international relations, environmental studies, or community organizing.

Sample First-Year Course
Law, Identity, and Bioscience
This course introduces students to the ways in which law shapes our lives and how society and culture effect how we interpret and experience law. In addition to reading materials from sociolegal studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, and women and gender studies, we will look at primary case materials that involve issues of law, identity, and bioscience. We will use case narratives as a point of entry to ask how scientific evidence, especially in the realm of genetics, has come to differently intervene in questions of law and identity. What can such analyses of law and its broader cultural contexts reveal about the legal encoding of norms of bioscience, processes of race and gender, and understandings of heredity and kin relations? Topics include the legal rights of animals; race, genetic identities, social justice; and sexuality, kinship, and property.

Facilities and Resources
The Law Program features a speakers’ forum that brings prominent legal practitioners and scholars from many parts of the world to give talks and lead discussions. In our Law Lunch series, informal gatherings are coordinated by a volunteer group of students and faculty who organize the talks and make tasty meals that help nourish the intellectual exchanges that take place. Recent law lunch topics include the exoneration of death row inmates through DNA testing, alternative juvenile justice models, human rights in Tibet, same-sex marriage and legal equality, reproductive rights of women of color, the establishment of constitutionalism in the new Eastern Europe, and the effects of the War on Terror on U.S. civil liberties. Law lunches take place several times each semester and often feature students presenting their own law-related research and reports on their internships and field experiences. Students are welcome to suggest speakers and topics for law lunches.

Founded in 1981, the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program (CLPP) was created to help organize women on issues of reproductive freedom and greater access to health and economic resources. Its companion program, Population and Development, was created in 1986 to respond to the increasing globalization of women’s issues. The program offers courses, invites visiting scholars and activists, and organizes national conferences on reproductive rights issues on campus. In addition, CLPP offers the Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps (RRASC) to allow students to work as activists on reproductive rights issues across the globe at organizations including: The Center for Reproductive Rights, Choice USA, Justice NOW, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, Pro-Choice Public Education Project, Third Wave Foundation, and the Youth Gender Project.