The Brown History Department frequently offers undergraduate courses in Legal History. Below are some examples offered in recent years.
HIST 1949A LEGAL HISTORY: THE CASE OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Spring 2026
Professor Faiz Ahmed
Course Description:
This seminar is devoted to exploring questions of law and legal history in the Middle East. Together we shall navigate a range of imperial, colonial, and national legal systems in the region via select case studies from the early modern Ottoman Empire to modern Middle East. Major themes include not only Islamicate legal traditions and jurisdictions, but the intersections, tensions, and synergy between Islamic law and Roman, Persianate, and European imperial legacies; fellow Abrahamic faiths and the interplay between religion and secularism; and the evolving role of international law including human rights and humanitarian law. From early schools of Islamic jurisprudence to Ottoman, Iranian, and Afghan constitutions, and the role of lawyers and judiciaries from decolonization to the Arab Spring uprisings, our goal is to explore the depth, diversity, and transformation of legal cultures and institutions across different epochs of Middle East history.
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HIST 1972A AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY
Fall 2025
Professor Michael Vorenberg
Course Description:
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar on US Legal History, with a focus especially on the period 1776-1920 and the theme of the relation between history and law, including the use of history in legal arguments and legal decisions. Although the main historical period covered is 1780-1920, we will necessarily be considering as well recent history—specifically the use and misuse of the history of this early period in law-related matters of the past two decades. Among the possible topics covered are firearms use and regulation; abortion and reproductive rights; and race, slavery, and servitude. Although issues of law are studied in the course, the course is first and foremost a History course. That is, it seeks to introduce students to the actual work historians do in order to produce scholarship: mastering complex arguments made by other historians; analyzing documents; writing cogent analyses. Therefore, many weeks involve some work with original sources in addition to significant reading in secondary sources. This is very much a student-directed course. Although I will moderate discussions and help students identify and execute projects, discussions will often consist of students sharing their individual findings with one another and trying to make sense of the work as a group.
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HIST 1570 AMERICAN LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
Spring 2025
Professor Michael Vorenberg
Course Description:
This course examines the relationship between American law and American history from the settlement of North America to the present. It rests on two interrelated presumptions. The first of these is that the study of American legal and constitutional history provides a distinctive, meaningful understanding of American history as a whole. “The law,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries.” Examining legal institutions, legal processes, and legal culture over time offers an avenue of insight into the changing relationship between power and the people, arguably the most important dynamic in American history. The second presumption of the course is that law cannot be understood without the benefit of a historical perspective. Holmes again: “[The law] cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.” In taking a historical perspective on the law, the course seeks to understand the way that social and cultural patterns shaped the terrain over which the law flowed as well as the way that contingent events shaped legal and constitutional development in unpredictable ways. One semester is too brief a time to cover every subject in American legal and constitutional history, so instead of offering a comprehensive survey of the subject, this course examines specific issues or episodes that demonstrate particularly well the close relationship between law and history. There are no prerequisites, though some background in U.S. history might be helpful (for example, a decent high-school history course).
This course takes a historical approach and is not the same as a course devoted to normative issues relating to the U.S. Constitution (such issues as: How should the Constitution be interpreted? What does the Constitution mean?) There are courses at Brown that focus primarily on such a normative approach (in the Political Science department, for example), but this course is not one of them. It is as much about law outside of the U.S. Constitution as it is about the U.S. Constitution, and it is more about the “law as source” (what can the law tell us about history?) than about the “law as subject” (what is the history of a particular law or doctrine?).