About

The Legal Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of law and society. As a department within the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Legal Studies offers its courses to the entire University and maintains a major for approximately four hundred students. One can say that Legal Studies is education about law, whereas law school is education in law. In fact, as a discipline, Legal Studies is based on the assumption that “law is too important to be left to lawyers.” The critical, humanistic approach of the program encourages students to investigate and develop their attitudes toward law and justice within the context of a growing literature of Legal Studies and related disciplines.