Law and Society
Course Title: Sovereignty and Personhood: Political Rights, Indigenous America, and the Orgins of International Law
Day and Time:
Law and Society is a seminar that examines a series of theological and juridical arguments in the context of the incremental development of international law as it pertains to human rights, political citizenship, and sovereign states, while considering the modern resonances of those debates in the persistence of certain cultural narratives.
This seminar considers the legal debates over sovereignty and personhood that roiled the Iberian world throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a world that spanned Iberia proper (Spain and Portugal) as well as overseas colonies in the Americas and West Africa. Students will read primary sources (in translation) by Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de las Casas, alongside modern scholarship that considers early modern debates over sovereignty, freedom, enslavement, as well as the persistence of historical narratives that often perpetuate mythologized visions of historical events. The design of the seminar is deliberately comparative, examining debates that emerged from the Spanish Americas alongside French and British legal arguments concerning sovereignty, land-use, and ideas about property that all underpinned the dispossession of indigenous peoples in the North American lands that became the United States.
These legal debates entered into cultural and historical narratives in the form of popular ways of depicting episodes of European colonialism, patterns of "settlement," changes in land use, and legal regimes that have arisen based on certain understandings of private property. This class will explore many of these narratives and the power they continue to exert in modern U.S. society. In readings and in visits to a variety of sites around Washington, D.C., students will explore the way this history has been written, mythologized, and represented in ways that perpetuate certain presumptions and stereotypes about sovereignty, "civilization," and "progress" that are present in the primary sources assigned for this class.
Andrew Devereux
Andrew Devereux is an historian of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean at UC San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. In his scholarship, Professor Devereux approaches the history of the Mediterranean from a global perspective, examining the Sea’s connections to the wider world, particularly those forces that brought the region into contact with Northern Europe, with West Africa, with Central Asia, as well as with the maritime systems of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
