This is a pretty decent class. It's nothing crazy to write home about, but it does teach you a decent amount about the ways law can be interpreted and discussed in the philosophical discipline. Worth taking if you want some breadth added to your degree.

This class centres around the approaches to reading law and interpreting it. There are many traditions, but we focus mainly on legal positivist and Marxist analysis. There are a bunch of different authors you study who have all sorts of opinions. They intersect and debate one another, and it's actually pretty interesting to see the approaches to how law is read and understood. Examples of authors read include: Marx, Engels, Kafka, Scalia, Litowitz, Dostoyevsky, Hart, Rawls, Fish, Luhmann, Barthes, Foucault, Nozick, Mill, etc. There's a lot in there, and there's not a lot of time to digest things. That works out in the class' favour, because everything builds on top of itself and ultimately amalgamates into a broader landscape of legal philosophy and interpretations thereof. 1 quiz per clas...read more

Dr. Lukits is kind and knowledgeable. He's got a lot of thoughts and can definitely lead some good discussions in class, which make class interesting and worth attending. His grading policies were also really chilled out. On the whole, he's a really solid professor who knows what he's doing.

Fortunately for me, I took this right after having taken his PHIL 375 course. I was prepped for this quantity of readings. I recommend you prepare yourself and master the art of skimming. Also, be ready to write a narrow-thesis phil paper. That's what your second paper is, and its requirements are specific (in order to do well).