The CLASS Center: About us--University of Washington

The Comparative Law and Society Studies Center at the University of Washington is committed to promoting interdisciplinary research and teaching as well as community service regarding law, justice, and human rights throughout the world.

The CLASS Center evolved out of two parallel but initially unrelated activities among faculty during the late 1990s at the University of Washington. For one thing, a small group of scholars in the social sciences committed themselves to revitalizing, restructuring, and updating the undergraduate Society and Justice program. Although a popular major on campus since its inception in the early 1970s, the program was ripe for reforms adjusting the core intellectual orientation to fit a reconstituted university faculty cohort, a changing socio-political context, and exciting intellectual developments in interdisciplinary socio-legal scholarship. At the same time, an inspired group of scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and law school began to meet together and to engage in cutting-edge, research-oriented study of law and society in comparative cross-national and transnational perspective. These scholars regularly held reading groups, organized conferences, and supervised graduate students on a variety of topics related to law, society, and politics in an increasingly globalized world.

From these parallel activities arose a single integrated vision for a reconstructed undergraduate program, a new research center, a graduate student resource network, and a community outreach agenda that forms the core of the interdisciplinary CLASS mission. A variety of funding initiatives from on and off campus followed. The first successful campus proposal was a substantial Tools for Transformation grant to work on reconstructing the undergraduate SoJu program into a cutting-edge law and society major. This grant facilitated, among other things, an extraordinarily productive three-day conference enlisting 25 faculty members in September 1999 and a new, ultimately successful proposal for a permanent University Initiatives Fund grant from the College of Arts and Sciences. The latter grant along with a variety of new College funds, existing SoJu program funding, and support from several departments enabled the hiring of six new faculty and two permanent staff members.

By spring, 2001, hiring of the staff and all but one of the new faculty positions was completed. Many initiatives were launched, including: a lively speaker series; several theme-based conferences with visiting scholars; coordination of various endeavors with other campus centers; reform of the undergraduate major; and new graduate mentoring networks. With its intellectual roots now well institutionalized in ongoing activities among members of a vibrant and diverse intellectual community, the CLASS Center is preparing for a major publicity campaign in fall, 2001.

The intellectual vision for the CLASS Center evolved out of faculty activity over a number of years, culminating in the application for new College UIF funding in 1999. We thus cite the text from that grant application outlining the center's unique aspirations:

The organization of modern societies is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As traditional local norms and institutional networks are loosening, the rule of law is increasingly becoming the primary mode of social control and cohesion in collective life. This is not entirely new or surprising. Sociologists long ago recognized that legal modes of social regulation, exchange, and disputing tend to proliferate as differently situated peoples increasingly interact with each another across greater distances through technologically advanced communications media. What is new, however, is the radical degree, pace, geographic scope, and diversity of these legalizing processes in contemporary social relations.

Life in our own society is, after all, now replete with the signs of law and legality. Nearly every dimension of our lives--work, family, community, politics, education, health care, consumption and recreation, etc.--is shaped by legal norms and transacted in the shadow of formal legal institutions. Moreover, every day we are exposed to newspapers, books, films, and TV shows that are saturated with images of legal practice, which themselves are attended by legal copyright claims. Even more dramatic, the forces of legalization are proceeding at unparalleled rates throughout the world. In particular, transformative globalizing processes facilitated by high-speed electronic communication, expanding multinational corporate capital, and transnational economic and political arrangements at once are led by, and create vast demands for, new modes of legal coordination and regulation. Virtually everywhere across the globe we can witness developing forms of constitutional governance, independent judicial power, formal disputing processes, legalized contractual exchange, professional lawyering, and legal (or "human") "rights talk." In sum, the rule of law today is radically more pervasive, invasive, and complex than ever before.

We at the UW are working to establish one of the most theoretically ambitious and internationally oriented intellectual centers in the U.S. dedicated to the study of these important socio-legal transformations.

Our programmatic venture has been rooted in the premise that new conceptual frameworks are necessary to analyze adequately the growing, changing presence of law in modern life. The new intellectual agenda we have developed differs dramatically from traditional "law & society" scholarship in four interrelated ways outlined below (1). Each of these innovations draws on research by leading socio-legal scholars around the world, but so far no high-quality, multi-unit university program exists that integrates the key elements in the way that we envision.

1. Interdisciplinary Study: An Integrated Approach.
Many existing law & society programs proclaim a commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching. However, in practice this typically has meant that traditional discipline-specific faculty and courses are simply aggregated into an eclectic patchwork of discrete activities. Our effort, by contrast, aims to nurture a community of scholars who truly integrate understandings, knowledge, and methods derived from several different disciplines at once. A profound commitment to such a synthetic interdisciplinary enterprise infuses every element of our vision for the new program outlined below, from our innovative conceptual framework for socio-legal analysis to the multi-dimensional institutional design for the new Center.

2. Law "in" Society: A New Conceptual Framework.
Traditional approaches to legal studies typically begin from assumptions that (state) law and society are separate, each relatively autonomous from one another. Research and teaching in most legal studies programs thus tend to focus on the internal workings of specific official state institutions where legal rules are made (e.g., appellate courts) and enforced (e.g., police) as "outputs" on society. While our program incorporates this "top down," state-centered approach, we also are attentive to law's variable presence as a constitutive force in society. In this "bottom up" view, law is not a unitary system of rules imposed on social relations, but rather it is understood to be manifest in multiple structures of knowledge, convention, and practice embedded and emergent within societies as well as states. As such, all citizens are viewed as legal subjects who variously obey, embrace, enforce, suffer, manipulate, contest, resist, and even remake law in institutional sites all over society -- at work, in families, in the street, in politics, in prisons, even in the classroom. The result is a radical redefinition of where and how legality is studied as a complex cultural fabric fusing both infra-state and state-authorized institutional forms of social control, compulsion, cohesion, and contestation.

3. Exploring Law's Diversity: A Comparative Approach.
Most law & society programs also are quite narrow in their geographic purview. In short, most programs devote the overwhelming bulk of attention to official legal institutions, conventions, and practices solely within the United States. Our program, by contrast, emphasizes systematic comparisons among legal institutions and practices within many different social contexts and among differently situated social groups. Such comparative study contributes to knowledge about the legal practices of diverse populations in different geographical sites and historical moments as well as to new generalizable theoretical insights about the variable forms, workings, and significance of law itself. This approach is especially relevant today, given that the rule of law is rapidly restructuring social relations at all levels around the world. The UW faculty is especially well suited for such study, given our strengths in theoretically informed study of class, race, gender, ethnic, and religious differences as well as regional specializations in Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, European, and North American cultures.

4. Emphasizing Law's Emergent Forms: Neo-Liberalism, Democratization, Globalism.
The agendas of most law & society programs have focused on the role of law in Western welfare states during the 1960s/1970s, when such programs were born. But that temporal focus has obscured important trends in socio-legal organization to which our program is attentive. One development is the rise of neo-liberalism in Western developed nations. This term implies new investments in private market forms of organization, reduced commitments to regulatory and redistributive welfare state policies, increased reliance on criminalization for mass governance, and revival of legal formalist ideals. A second, quite different change entails processes of democratization within local, national, and regional governance throughout many other parts of the world. In these transformative processes, legal experts have served as architects of new constitutional structures, judicial institutions, rights entitlements, and related legal conventions. A third related change noted earlier is the process of globalization, whereby transnational (supra-state) economic and political forces are developing to challenge, alter, and even supplant traditional local and state-based authorities. Indeed, law and legal experts are becoming more important than ever in structuring new realms of commercial market expansion, new forms of international and transnational political control (WTO, NAFTA), and new processes of political and economic dispute resolution (European Court of Justice) -- all beyond traditional state authority. The emergence of transnational human rights advocacy networks represents but one dimension of such transformative legal forces. The CLASS Center is committed to promoting research and teaching that integrates all of these sophisticated insights into cutting-edge socio-legal inquiry.

The Comparative Law and Society Studies Center entails an entirely new interdisciplinary, integrated multi-unit institutional structure for advancing its innovative intellectual vision on the UW campus. At the core of this structure is the academic community of faculty scholars who will work together at the four levels outlined briefly below. See the web links or program staff for further details about each component of CLASS.

1. Law, Societies, and Justice: An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Program.
This new program represents a substantially transformed and expanded version of the former Society & Justice program. The new program will serve up to 150 majors by the 2002-3 academic year, which is about double the size of the Society and Justice program during the 1990s. LSJ now has its own staff academic counselor, program assistant, and a long term faculty director. The curriculum is taught primarily by tenure-line faculty and qualified instructors associated with the Center who emphasize the substantive approaches to law discussed above. Admission is competitive and selective. Students must complete three of four regularly offered core classes and two methodology requirements prior to program admission. The remainder of the curriculum is organized into three tracks, each with 8-12 annual course offerings. The three tracks are: (1) Crime, Social Control, and Justice; (2) Comparative Legal Institutions and Politics; and (3) Rights, Resistance, and Reconstructions in Law. Law, Societies, and Justice website

2. The CLASS Graduate Fellows Program.
The Center provides a coordinated network of new faculty, classes, and financial resources to a select group of CLASS graduate fellows in the social sciences. This network provides important opportunities to students working within existing disciplines as well as grants a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. certificate for CLASS fellows who complete their disciplinary Ph.D. programs. CLASS graduate fellows are eligible for funding to attend annual Law and Society Association meetings, to participate in ongoing reading groups and colloquia, to work with resident and visiting scholars, and to compete for research funding opportunties provided by CLASS and its affilated faculty. The expanded cohort of socio-legal scholars in Political Science, Sociology, JSIS, Geography, American Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, Law, and beyond likewise greatly enhances the long distinguished criminology group in Sociology. Such modes of training are opening to UW graduate students faculty placement opportunities in top university research institutions, undergraduate legal studies and criminal justice programs, and law schools around the nation. Graduate Fellows page

3. Faculty Research Support.
The CLASS Center aims to provide an infrastructure for supporting the growing community of socio-legal scholars on campus and generating new types of theoretically sophisticated empirical research on themes outlined above. Center activities include: (a) facilitation of exchanges among researchers, academic units, and other existing centers; (b) support for an ongoing colloquia series; (c) collaboration with specific units and other programs to bring visiting socio-legal scholars to our campus; (d) outreach to relevant community constituencies; (e) extensive fund-raising from local organizations, individual alumni, and friends; and (f) provision of support for faculty and graduate student research grant and fellowship submission. The last element is critical, as abundant grant sources exist for comparative legal research of the type we embrace. We have already secured funding from Ford, NSF, and several Title VI grants. Plans to obtain far more resources have already been discussed with these and other organizations. By leveraging such funding, the Center is seeking to generate one of the most visionary research communities for socio-legal scholarship in the nation. Research page

4. Community Outreach and Service.
Community outreach and service are integrated into all three of the other activities that bind the CLASS collective. A vital source of community involvement is facilitated through the required internship program in the LSJ major, which places students in government offices, non-profit organizations, rights advocacy groups, and law firms throughout Washington State. Faculty also regularly deliver talks, prepare research, and provide information for both selected and general publics. The CLASS leadership is presently developing a program for contacting law-related professional associations and agencies throughout the state to develop further these vital linkages and interactions.

This page last updated 4/30/08

Website created by: W. Washington

Photos: Deborah Hughes, William Washington