Undergraduate Major Law & Politics (BA) International

This course examines the tools, goals, and patterns of U.S. foreign policy. It evaluates how domestic actors, ideology, and the international system have shaped specific policies and political-military strategies, including isolationism, selective engagement, containment, and preemption. It assesses key U.S. foreign policy challenges, from geopolitical rivalries, terrorism, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction to global governance, climate change, and economic globalization.

This course explores the structure and function of state and local governments in the United States, with an emphasis on their roles as partners with the federal government in a system of cooperative federalism. Students spend much of the course playing and critiquing their own performance in Camelot, a role-playing simulation game in which they assume the roles of civic leaders, representatives of organized interests, and other interested parties in a hypothetical city to try to resolve controversial policy dilemmas like the ones with which local communities are confronted routinely in the United States.

This course explores the diversity of conceptions of the individual, the state, and "the good life" that animate contemporary societies and their critics, with an emphasis on the contributions of Western political theorists of both ancient and modern times to contemporary currents of political thought. This course places special emphasis on the social and cultural contexts in which these theorists lived and worked as factors that helped to shape their political ideas. The theorists covered may vary from semester to semester. Writing intensive course.

Campaigns and elections are central features of the American democratic process. This course will provide students with a deeper appreciation of how campaigns and elections set the rhythm of American political life and shape the functioning of our governmental system. Students will develop an in-depth understanding of the mechanics of political campaigns, with a special emphasis on electoral strategy, media relations, and voter mobilization. Students will use these concepts to analyze key elections during pivotal moments in our nation's political history. The course will also include considerable discussion of the role that our own New Hampshire Primary plays in the electoral process.

How can businesses, governments, and public interest groups achieve environmental sustainability goals in legal and political contexts that were designed with other goals in mind? This interdisciplinary course explores the options in the United States, and provides a comprehensive point of comparison for topics explored in POL 329 and POL 349. Students spend about half of the course learning how to spot facts that give rise to compliance issues for businesses and other private parties under a full spectrum of federal environmental laws, and to identify opportunities for achieving broader sustainability goals within the constraints imposed by the law. In the other half, students learn both how to predict environmental law and policy outcomes and how to shape them adaptively in pursuit of sustainability goals in a fragmented system of governance that was designed to privilege special interests and to favor the status quo.

How can businesses, governments, and civil society organizations work together to build environmentally sustainable economies and livable local communities in an increasingly crowded and globalized world? [sic] Students in this interdisciplinary course use insights drawn from the social sciences to identify assumptions about human nature and nurture that lead to environmentally unsustainable economic and development practices, then apply those insights to the practical problems of building robust national economies and healthy local communities worldwide, with an emphasis on less developed countries. Students spend part of the course playing and critiquing their own performance in Stratagem, a computer-assisted simulation game, in which they assume the roles of government ministers in a less developed country and try to chart a course of environmentally sustainable development for that country over more than half a century.

This course explores the structure and function of the Congress of the United States, with an emphasis on its role as a legislative body in a system of government characterized by the separation of powers and checks and balances. The topics covered include the congressional leadership structure, the committee system, major rules and procedures, legislative-executive relations, congressional elections, and representation, and may vary from semester to semester.

This course aims to dispel some of the myths about lawyers as advocates that are perpetuated by popular culture and the mass media in the United States. Students spend much of the course exploring case studies that illustrate the ethical dilemmas faced by lawyers as advocates in the American legal system, the ethical rules that govern their behavior as a condition of their license to practice law, and the fates that befall them when they fail to fulfill their ethical obligations. In addition, students learn how to write parts of an appellate legal brief of the type that first-year law students in American law schools learn how to write, and how to make an appellate oral argument on behalf of hypothetical clients in a moot court setting.

How effective is environmental law as a strategy for achieving sustainable development? How does its diversity across countries and cultures constrain the ability of businesses, governments, and civil society organizations to achieve environmental sustainability goals in an increasingly globalized world? This interdisciplinary course examines the many legal, political, cultural, and other factors that shape the answer to these questions, using China, India, Russia, and the United States as illustrative examples. Students explore the implications of these factors not only for businesses, governments, and civil society organizations pursuing sustainability goals within their own countries, but also for their counterparts in other countries to whom the former are linked through bilateral trade relationships and global supply chains.

This course highlights central themes in the historical development, organization, and functioning of the American presidency. From the origins of our Constitution through two centuries of institutional development and up to the present day, this course will provide students with an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of presidential behavior. Special emphasis will be placed on the growth of presidential power in both foreign and domestic policy and on the central role that presidential elections play in our national politics. Students will learn to view the American presidency as a complex institution, one that requires the president to simultaneously play multiple political roles, including commander-in-chief, legislator, communicator, civic leader and candidate.

This course will explore the significance of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to US foreign policy and world politics, including the nuclear rivalry between the US and USSR during the Cold War and more recent international security threats related to the spread of these so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Special attention will be paid to the complex policy and technical challenges concerning these weapons. This course will also examine the politics of arms control and disarmament as they relate to WMD.

This course is a comparative study of genocide. It is divided into three parts. The first part examines the definition, causes, typologies, and antecedents of modern genocide. The second part analyzes six cases of modern genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, and the Darfur (Sudan) genocide. The third and last part evaluates efforts by the international community to punish genocide's perpetrators and to prevent future mass atrocities.

This course examines the role of intelligence in U.S. national security policy making and implementation. It defines key intelligence concepts, agencies and actors; and explores the evolving forms and functions of intelligence. Emphasis is placed on how effectively the intelligence community addresses specific national security challenges, including terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and cyber espionage and warfare. Students will evaluate the success and failure of various intelligence operations and debate what the proper role of intelligence should be in a liberal democracy.