Netherlands

Full course description

This course aims to introduce students to the general content of modern law and to the discipline of legal reasoning. These two go together. Law cannot be fully understood in abstraction of the particular way that lawyers, judges and other expert operators of the legal system look at it. Coming  out of the course, students should be able to understand what law is and how it is different from (and similar to) morality, identify the main branches of Law and their basic institutions, recognize and differentiate the principal values underlying those branches and understand the nature of legal  reasoning and be able to apply it to legal problems. 

It is often assumed that to study law means essentially to study the law of a particular jurisdiction. A Dutch lawyer studies Dutch law and a German lawyer studies German law, and there is little that they share beyond the name of their chosen profession. This picture is misleading. Despite the fact that every country establishes its own legal system, there is much less diversity in law than what one would imagine. A key theme of this course is that law arises naturally as a solution to various social problems and, to the extent that human societies face the same problems, similar responses appear almost everywhere. Even though details may vary, contract, property, inheritance, marriage, constitutions and crimes exist in almost all modern societies. Instead of focusing on specific sets of rules like the Dutch Civil Code, or the French Criminal Code, this course focuses on these widely shared problems and widely shared institutional responses. 

With regards to legal reasoning, the course asks students to create a tax, which will help them understand how law can be used as a policy tool for regulatory and redistributive purposes. In this connection, the course will also include a “workshop” where students will be asked to go through a high profile judgment and identify the logical moves taken by a court to justify its decision.

Course objectives

• To introduce students to the basic areas of law (contracts, property, torts, criminal law, international law etc.). 

• To familiarize students with the methods of legal reasoning. 

• To illustrate to students how law arises in response to social problem and how it is different from other domains such as politics and morality. 

In this course, the study of international economic relations is central. These relations involve the exchange of goods and services, factors of production, and financial flows across borders. International trade and financial flows are a strong force in international relations and politics. This course provides an introduction to trade flows, international specialization, and exchange. Neoclassical and modern trade theory are addressed before analyzing trade policy, international macroeconomics, and financial relations. Having established the link between financial and real economic variables, students turn to exchange rates, currency trading, and the global monetary system. The course pays special attention to the differences between developing and developed economies. Students build on their knowledge of macro- and microeconomics, narrowing in on the international aspects of both. Gains from trade and specialization are typically considered microeconomic topics, while international financial relations are macroeconomic in nature.

This course familiarizes students with the theory and methodology of planning for urban quality of life. The course activities include theory lectures and a practical group assignment. The theory lectures focus on selected aspects of quality of life relevant to urban and regional planning. The group assignment focuses on analyzing and designing the regional spatial organization and building spatial scenarios for the future spatial development of a region. The assignment and related instruction lectures familiarize students with methods for prospective and projective scenario study. The methods and techniques are applied in the context of an urban region in the Netherlands. The overall planning task for the assignment is to develop an integrated spatial vision, scenarios, and strategies for the region for the long term (30 years) that can support the discussion about the future development of the region.  The assignment addresses some selected topics, while each group can choose its own focal issues. The main emphasis is on practicing methods and techniques for analyzing and designing spatial organization and building scenarios. The concepts for analyzing and designing the spatial organization of the area are provided in theory and instruction lectures. A study trip helps students to understand the context of the issues at hand.

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary research field of Transitional Justice which may include both judicial and non-non-judicial mechanisms, with different levels of international involvement and individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting, and dismissals. The course explores the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, the aftermath of colonialism in Africa and Indonesia, the aftermath of communism, truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and different types of retributive justice in dealing with the Rwandan genocide. This course looks at the effectiveness of the Transitional Justice mechanisms, its measure of effectiveness on a state level, and statistical outcomes.

Apart from offering sensory feedback for object manipulation and movement, the somatosensory system also provides signals that are intrinsically rewarding or punishing. The behavioral drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain is of crucial importance for survival and partly relies on the same neurochemical circuitry. This course discusses the neurobiological basis of aversive and pleasant somatosensory processing. Brain circuits involved in nociception and analgesia as well as theories and treatments of chronic pain are discussed.

Stress is a major determinant of global public health. Stress has been called a “health epidemic of the twenty-first century” by the World Health Organization and is associated with massive humanitarian, medical, and economic costs. This course introduces the basic principles of how our body's health is threatened by psychosocial stressors as diverse as daily worries, work stress, low social economic status, discrimination, and natural disasters. A major role is played by psychological factors such as perceived control, and conscious and unconscious thoughts, and emotions. The lectures cover the many ways in which the mind influences the body during stress, including the cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems, metabolism, sleep, growth, ageing, reproduction, and sex. The course discusses stress management and recent contributions from the field of emotion regulation. Stress is not a “luxury problem” of the industrialized countries; it is also, and perhaps even more so, a leading health risk in less developed countries. Therefore, the course also explores the global relevance of stress and health. There is hardly a concept that is so ill defined in and outside science and at the same time so important for our health as stress. Not surprisingly the media are teeming with erroneous information about its effect on health. Students learn how to systematically gather information about stress and health thereby training the essential academic skill of distinguishing scientific knowledge from omnipresent unsupported claims in the rapidly accumulating information volume in the media (especially internet), and evaluating this knowledge in terms of its meaning for public health. This course requires students to have completed an introduction to psychology course as a prerequisite.

This version of the Medical Ethics course includes an Independent Study Project (ISP) done under the direction of the instructor. The minimum reading is between 20 and 25 articles from established academic periodicals/magazines. The ISP is 10-12 pages and counts for 1/3 of the overall grade for the course. This course provides students with an introductory investigation into the question of if, when, and how ethical considerations can or must play a role in the practice of the medical profession. It makes students aware of the fact that the health sciences are not operating in a moral vacuum and that a good knowledge of both older and recent ethical debates in this particular field is of the greatest significance. This course consists of three parts. The first part of the course gives an introduction to some fundamental European philosophical ideas of what it means to be a human being. This introduction is accompanied by an introduction to the most important ethical theories of the West. The second part of the course discusses a general framework of medical ethics as it could play a guiding role in the day-to-day practice of those who are members of the medical profession or related areas. The third part of the course discusses some of the most important and well-known ethical problems that can be found within the medical field. There are lectures, discussions, and the study of cases that reflect the most important problems and topics that make up the moral challenges of the medical discipline of today. 

In the first week of the semester, students are confronted with the contrasts between the “European” approach to healthcare and public health and that of the United States (before and since the reforms of 2010). This comparative approach sets the stage for identifying what is common in European approaches to healthcare and the broader promotion of health. This sets the stage for the subsequent analyses of differences among European health systems (Health Systems Module) and for understanding broader European health strategies and the EU Health Strategy itself (Health Strategies Module). Additionally, students are stimulated to consider the complexity of change processes for health. The aim of the first module is to explore the harmonization of health systems and the impact of health care reforms in Europe with special attention given to health systems in transition and second, to analyze the European challenges of cross-border care and patient mobility given by the execution of the sanction of the European Union of the free movement of goods, individuals, services, capital and payments in terms of health. Students are introduced to the European institutions and the legal basis for the EU taking up health issues. This module focuses much more on national health systems and national health systems within the context of European policy and practice. The module introduces a system approach to health in Europe. It focuses on the European differences paying special attention to Eastern European countries with health systems in transition–a special focus is on Poland. Special attention is given to theory on the organization of health services, basic health economics, and the financing of health systems in order to enhance the ability to analyze health systems in a European perspective. Cross-border care is included as an emerging field of interest from patient's points of view as well as from decision maker's point of view. The module provides the students an opportunity to analyze regional cross-border projects in order to create awareness of these challenges facing Europe now and in the near future. Organizational theory as well as theory on networking are presented as tools to analyze cross-border care and health systems in transition. Health care systems can be positioned in different domains of society, namely as systems that contribute to the dynamics of the state and the market or to the dynamics of daily life and social participation of citizens. So constructed, each system offers its own internal dynamics with distinct functions and operations which might be at conflict with the functions and operations being distinct for related systems. The interconnection of this system interplay is addressed, showing how various systems claim they operate in the interest of the citizen, yet displaying differential effects on autonomy, choice and good life of citizens. Thus, the notion of transition (or related concepts such as progress and innovation) can be identified as a social arena, in which different notions of justice and injustice in public health practices are emerging, struggling and conflicting with each other. In the Skills Training module, students are trained in bargaining and negotiating skills, and they are introduced to writing their first drafts of a curriculum vitae and a cover letter. In workshops, students learn the basics of distributive bargaining and integrative negotiation. In the six workshops students are offered practical experiences and theoretical information about the most important components involved in a negotiation process. The examples and practical exercises are based on public health professional context. In this course, one plenary lecture and six workshops around the skill of negotiation are offered. The module covers such topics as: the interdependence between the negotiators, the possibilities to claim value but also to create value for all parties involved, strategies and tactics of distributive negotiation (often distributed negotiation is also called bargaining) as well as integrative negotiation, planning and chairing negotiations, negotiating in situations in which multiple parties are involved, parties which could have a very different cultural background.

This course offers an overview of different theories related to economics and justice to analyze issues such as the trade-off between equity and efficiency. The course discusses questions including: How do these theories operationalize equity? How do they deal with the trade-off between equity and efficiency? And how can they be incorporated in economic models? The course focuses in particular on Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources and Roemer’s theory of equality of opportunity. Dworkin’s theory makes use of devices such as auctions and hypothetical insurance markets that economists are very familiar with. Roemer has shown that his theory can be formulated in terms that can be tested empirically in different domains (e.g. income, education, health care). The course consists of lectures and working groups.