Fall lecture course: Sovereignty
Announcement for Berkeley undergraduates: With the UC Berkeley Commencement now over, I am now focusing on next year already. My fall lecture will be a special topics course on the theme of Sovereignty. This is one of my regular courses on my undergraduate teaching cycle.
The centerpiece of the course will include a close study of this text, in my view, the most important historical text on the theory of sovereignty:
 |
| Jean Bodin, De Republica Libri VI (Paris: Jacques Du Puys, 1591) |
This has been the focus of my research for the better part of the last decade, and we will have much to explore. In addition, we will survey the medieval legal sources of sovereignty in Roman and canon law; the classical theories of Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Rousseau; the legal history of sovereignty in Public International Law from Westaphalia to Vattel and the League of Nations and the ICJ and R2P. I may make some amendments to the syllabus, but this should give us enough for a semester.
Students will have a chance to examine some of the original print treatises on sovereignty - one of my most prized pieces in my library is the 1591 Bodin. There is an interesting provenance. I acquired this several years ago through a bookseller in Ottawa. I suspected that this book may have once been connected to the C.20 scholar of Bodin, Kenneth McRae, who taught for many years at the University of Ottawa. I was right:
