Legal History Meets the Honors Program

In this article, the author discusses the "Law and Culture" course that he developed to teach in the Butler University Honors Program. The course looks at some landmark periods or events in legal history and explores how those events were the product of their culture, and how they affected their culture. Among the events or periods that the author has looked at in iterations of this course were the survival instinct on display in "Regina v. Dudley and Stephens," the Nuremberg trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the modern American litigation explosion, and the events surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court decision "Kelo v. City of New London." A goal of this course is to address the themes using a number of different types of texts, including court decisions, historical documents, novels, essays, research scholarship, and films. The interdisciplinary nature of this course and the interplay of fiction, nonfiction, and film have caused students to appreciate the importance of law and its development and the interplay of law and culture. They also develop insights on the influence of law and culture on their daily lives.