This class explores the fundamental roles that law plays in organizing contemporary social life. It considers various ways of understanding law's complex presence in society: how law shapes and enables social interaction, how law constructs differences among people and their actions, how law mediates and enforces power relationships, and how law matters for the kind of society we have. Official legal institutions (courts) and actors (judges, police, lawyers, etc.) will be examined, as well as how law works as a complex array of norms, symbols, discourses, and practices.