What Each Major Knows II
35 pieces · 7.4 hours of reading
Legal Systems of the World: Same Human Problems, Different Answers
Every society has to decide what happens when a promise is broken, someone is hurt, land is disputed, a crime is done, or power is abused. The world's legal families answer those five questions in recognisably different ways, and knowing which family you are standing in explains most of what a lawyer does there.
ReadInteractive12 min02Legal Reasoning & Writing: From a Rule and Some Facts to an Answer
Lawyers do not look up the answer. They build it: find the rule, state the facts, say what the words mean, and show why this case is like or unlike another. The tools differ between a US law school and a German state exam, but the skeleton is the same.
ReadInteractive11 min03Constitutional Law: The Rules for the People Who Make the Rules
Every country has to decide who may tell the government "no", and what happens when a parliament passes a law that breaks the highest law. The American, European and Latin American answers are different inventions, and each one fits the history that produced it.
ReadInteractive13 min04Contracts & Obligations: What Makes a Promise Bind
Every society must decide which promises it will back with force. The answers differ by family, but the five questions behind them do not.
ReadInteractive14 min05Torts & Civil Liability: Who Pays When Someone Is Hurt
Every accident forces a choice about who absorbs the loss. Tort law is the machinery for choosing, and the legal families built it very differently.
ReadInteractive13 min06Property: Who Gets to Say No
Ownership is a bundle of rights, proved by paper or a register, ripened by time, and limited by everyone else. Every legal family builds the bundle differently.
ReadInteractive14 min07Criminal Law & Procedure: Guilt, Proof and Who Runs the Trial
Every legal system has to decide when the state may punish a person, and how sure it must be first. The answers differ more in how the trial is run than in what counts as a crime.
ReadInteractive14 min08Civil Procedure & Evidence: How a Dispute Becomes a Case, and What Counts as Proof
The rules that decide who can sue whom, where, how the facts are found and how sure a judge must be are as important as the rules of right and wrong themselves.
ReadInteractive11 min09Administrative Law: How Government Is Held to the Law
Most of what a state does to you is done by an official, not a legislature or a court. Administrative law is the set of rules that make the officials answer.
ReadInteractive12 min10International Law & Human Rights: Rules Between Nations Without a World Police
Nobody can arrest a state. Yet ships dock, planes land, borders mostly hold and a handful of dictators have ended up in the dock. How law works when the only lawmakers are the ones it binds.
ReadInteractive14 min11European Union Law: The Deepest Legal Union, and Its Rivals
Twenty-seven countries let one court tell their own judges which law wins. How that happened, how it works, and which regions in Latin America and Africa tried the same thing and what they kept.
ReadInteractive12 min12Political Theory: Justice, Power, Legitimacy and Liberty
Four questions every society answers whether it knows it or not: who rules, why anyone obeys, how free people should be, and what a fair share looks like. Thinkers from Athens, Qufu, Pataliputra and Tunis gave different answers, and each is still in use.
ReadInteractive13 min13Comparative Politics: Why Countries Are Governed So Differently
Same humans, same problems, wildly different rulebooks. Comparative politics asks who can fire whom, how many hands sit on the lever, and why some democracies last while others quietly stop being one.
ReadInteractive13 min14International Relations: Why Fear Needs No Villain
There is no government above governments. From that one fact, scholars derive arms races, deterrence, alliances and the long argument over whether trade, institutions or shared values can buy peace.
ReadInteractive13 min15Elections, Parties & Public Opinion: Rules That Turn Votes into Power
The same ballots can give one party a landslide or three parties a coalition. Which one happens depends on arithmetic you can learn in an afternoon, and on what polls can and cannot see.
ReadInteractive14 min16Public Policy: How Problems Become Policies, and What Then Goes Wrong
A city charges fifteen cents for a plastic bag and the bags nearly vanish. A famous job-training scheme is announced with fanfare and fizzles in a maze of approvals. Public policy is the study of why the first happens, why the second is more common, and how to tell which is which.
ReadInteractive13 min17Political Economy: Why the Rules Decide Who Gets Rich
Two towns share a name and a border; one is far richer than the other. Two countries find the same oil; one builds a fund, the other a feud. Political economy asks how rules, power and incentives shape who prospers, and the honest answer is that the field still argues about it.
ReadInteractive12 min18Research Methods in Political Science: How Anyone Knows Anything About Politics
Do mailers raise turnout? Does a minimum wage cost jobs? Does a close election hand a party the next one? Political science is full of causal claims, and this course is about the difference between a claim you can believe and one that only sounds good.
ReadInteractive13 min19Research Methods in Psychology: How to Not Fool Yourself
Psychology asks questions that cannot be put on a scale, answers them with small noisy samples, and then discovered that many famous answers did not repeat. The methods course is how the field learned to check itself.
ReadInteractive11 min20Biological Psychology: The Wet Machine Behind the Mind
Every thought, mood and night's sleep is made of cells that fire or stay quiet, chemicals that drift across a gap twenty nanometres wide, and blood flow that scanners can see. The course teaches what that does and does not explain.
ReadInteractive12 min21Sensation & Perception: The Brain's Best Guess
You do not see what is in front of you. You see the brain's best guess about it, built from noisy signals in a few hundred milliseconds. The course teaches how the signals are made, how close the guess usually is, and what happens when it is wrong.
ReadInteractive11 min22Cognitive Psychology: A Narrow Beam and a Rebuilding Crew
You attend to very little, hold about four chunks, and rebuild every memory as you use it. That design is clever, and it is why a confident witness can be sincerely wrong.
ReadInteractive14 min23Learning & Behavior: Surprise Is the Teacher
Signals learn to predict, actions are shaped by what follows, and the size of the surprise decides how much changes. From Pavlov's dogs to dopamine and the 66-day habit.
ReadInteractive12 min24Developmental Psychology: How Minds Are Built, and What Later Research Revised
From Piaget's stages to false beliefs, attachment and the long rebuild of adolescence. What held up, what shifted, and why heritability is not a pie chart.
ReadInteractive14 min25Social Psychology: How Other People Change What We Do
The classic experiments say that ordinary people go along, obey and look away. The re-checked versions say something more careful, and more interesting: the situation matters a great deal, and so does what people think the situation is.
Deep diveInteractive15 min26Personality & Individual Differences: What Varies Between People
Why people differ, how psychologists measure it, how stable it is, and how much of it is inherited. Most of what you were taught about this in a magazine quiz is the weakest part.
ReadInteractive14 min27Clinical Psychology: Where Normal Ends and Care Begins
What makes something a disorder, how the two big manuals disagree, why causes are never just one thing, which treatments have good evidence, and why most of the world's people who need help never get it.
ReadInteractive14 min28Close Reading & Poetry: How a Poem Means
A poem is a few words under a great deal of pressure. Sound, beat, image, line and form are the five places the pressure comes from, and once you can see them, every poem in every language opens a little.
ReadInteractive11 min29Narrative: Who Tells It, and When
A story is what happened. A narrative is how it is told. Almost everything a storyteller does, from the first sentence to the last twist, is a choice about order, speed and who gets to speak.
ReadInteractive10 min30Epic, Myth & the Ancient Literatures: The First Great Stories
Before there were novels, there were poems sung for hours about kings, heroes, gods and the fear of dying. They were made out loud, changed in every performance, and they still shape what we think a story is.
ReadInteractive13 min31Drama & Tragedy: Words Made to Be Done
A play on the page is half a work. The other half happens in a room, in front of other people, in real time. Every great tradition of drama, from Athens to Kyoto to Lagos, found its own way to use that.
ReadInteractive13 min32The Novel: A Mind You Can Live Inside
The novel is the form that lets you spend forty hours inside another person's head. It was invented more than once, in more than one place, and its biggest tricks were learned slowly.
ReadInteractive10 min33Modern, Postcolonial & Contemporary Literature: Who Gets to Tell It
In a hundred years, the novel went from one tidy narrator in one tidy world to a global argument. Its new tools were inner time, a deadpan voice for the impossible, a second language, and the right to answer back.
ReadInteractive11 min34Literary Theory & Criticism: The Questions Behind Every Reading
A poem can be asked a dozen different questions. Each school of criticism is a standing question, and the arguments between them are where the thinking happens.
ReadInteractive14 min35Translation & World Literature: Who Carries a Book Across
Every book you read from another language is someone's choices. And whether it crossed the border at all was decided by people, prizes and money.
ReadInteractive12 min