Recent legal developments surrounding judicial scrutiny of institutional decision-making in higher education like the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals 2026 decision in Doe v. Rice University, which cites the university’s reliance on archaic assumptions and sex-based stereotypes, shine a spotlight upon instances in which academic administrators and universities selectively enforce their own rules. In another such case this year, legal action was again brought against Rice when its Dean of Humanities was accused of discrimination in deflecting a request for a same-sex partner hire while simultaneously denying this professor's right to study law in asserting that a career in the humanities is entirely incompatible with legal education. Such cases invite broader reflection upon inhumanity in university administration and on the intersection of law and humanities.

This seminar welcomes papers that interrogate injustice at the law and humanities crossroads. By exploring legal studies in conversation with comparative literary representation, it seeks to examine both how law and the humanities interact as well as how literature might reveal various forms of inhumanity that legal systems may also serve to enable or produce. Papers are welcome from those working across literary studies, law, gender and sexuality studies, history, media and cultural studies, philosophy, politics, and other disciplines.