300049 Inequality and Injustice - Law and Legal systems in Diverse and Cleavaged Societies (International Track) (S) (SoSe 2016)

From birth to death law has an impact on all forms of social behavior and on almost all circles of life. The course will explore sociological understanding of law and the legal institutions and their impact on our daily life focusing on diverse and cleavaged societies. We will examine first the social process of defining what is and what isn’t deviant behavior as well as stigmatization. We will see who are those in our society who are mostly affected and to what stratum in our societies they belong. These issues will be covered from the angle of both consensus and conflict theory.
We will then examine and show how extra legal variables such as race, ethnicity and socio economic status affect judicial and legal processes and decision making. While examining whether the law contributes to a more stable society or under certain circumstances leads to polarization especially in societies that become more heterogeneous we will look at the question of "..is there a prima facie obligation to obey the law" and how do members of heterogeneous societies refer to this issue. We will also look at some other topics such as "Whe do People obey ( or disobey) the law, trust and legitimacy and attitudes towards the law and the legal system, all with regard to different racial, ethnic and socio economics group. We will finally touch upon two issues in which ethnicity and socio economic status have a strong effect, one deals with discrepancies between ethnic groups in legal decision making and the other deals with one of the more notorious miscarriages of justice namely, convicting innocent people and we will attempt to understand why and who are the people who are most frequently exposed to these phenomena.