A Word from the Chair
The Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University is home to Canada’s premier Legal Studies program.
We are the oldest and largest undergraduate program in Legal Studies in the country. Emerging in 1967 as the first unit in Canada to study law with multidisciplinary academic concerns in mind, the Department now offers a BA & BA (Honours) in Law to over 1500 students within the Faculty of Public Affairs and includes concentrations in Human Rights & Transnational Law, Business Law, and Law, Policy and Government among its undergraduate programs.
In 1991, Carleton also became the first University in the country to offer an MA in Legal Studies and, beginning in the Fall of 2011, we accepted our first cohort of PhD students.
Until recently the study of law was the near exclusive concern of professional law schools with programs that had a vocational emphasis and a scholarly orientation limited to the study of technical legal doctrine and legal reasoning through exposition. Yet social scientists, historians, philosophers, and public policy analysts as well as other scholars have developed an increasing interest in the study of the role and the potential of law and its administration in the context of social, economic and political structures. Legal Studies as a project integrates questions and methods drawn from a number of different disciplinary fields including feminist studies, history, philosophy, political theory and sociology. Utilizing techniques and insights from these and other intellectual traditions, legal studies focuses on the complex nature of the interaction between law and other social fields This relational orientation of legal studies offers an alternative to the traditional viewpoint according to which legal rules, institutions and procedures develop according to their own autonomous internal logic without reference to other aspects of social, political, cultural and economic life.
Owing to the diversity of our approaches, a third of our full-time faculty have social science doctorates, another third hold doctorates in law, and another 10% have social science PhDs as well as LLMs. The Department’s faculty constitutes the country’s most comprehensive research and teaching resources for interdisciplinary legal inquiry. The faculty is composed of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary teaching and research from a range of disciplines including criminology, history, law, legal anthropology, political economy, political theory, mass communications and sociology. Included among our areas of teaching and research are Crime, Governance and Security; Globalization, International Law and Transnational Justice; Citizenship, Human Rights and Political Economy; Gender, Sexuality and Identity; Law, History, Culture and Humanities; and Conflict Resolution.
Welcome to Canada’s leader in Legal Studies teaching and research. We look forward to growing together.
George S. Rigakos
Chair