London School of Economics

This course covers keystone technologies from bioweapons to killer robots to provide insight into pressing political questions such as: What role does technology play in warfare and in international security? How have the tools of war changed – and what do those changes mean for the laws, norms, ethics, conduct, and strategy of conflict? How can we combat the national and international security risks of emerging technologies?

The course considers how AI changes the legal landscape and how lawyers, and anyone interested in how our society is regulated, needs to adapt to this new landscape. It does so by examining how AI automates processes based upon data, a process known as datafication, and how data is used to train, and the algorithms at the heart of AI. It asks how this impacts our data privacy and whether data protection law is ready to deal with this new wave of personal data exploitation. From here it moves on to examine who controls the development and deployment of these algorithms, and how we might control their development and deployment in AI systems. It concludes by examining the current legal framework for AI regulation and asks how we should regulate AI and which approach is likely to be effective. 

This course is an introduction to the strategic management of modern diversified firms. It studies how the firm’s portfolio of products and its internal organization can be designed to maximize corporate performance. The focus of this course is on the strategic plan for managing a diversified firm. It studies how the firm portfolio of products and its internal organization can be designed to maximize corporate performance. It combines in a unified framework the study of two separate but complementary issues: the opportunities and challenges afforded by the firm’s external environment, and the resources and capabilities arising from the firm’s internal environment.

This course takes both a short and long-term view of the economy, helping students understand recent developments in macroeconomics using graphic analysis and simple algebra. It focuses on the stylized facts of business cycle fluctuations, economic growth, and unemployment. Embedding students' learning through the analysis of real-world situations, including the European Monetary Union, the European Crisis and the Great Recession, students discuss how modern macroeconomics can shed light on these important areas and evaluate the scope for policy to improve macroeconomic performance.

This course introduces students to a range of high-profile controversies by viewing them through the prism of the law. It enables the students to transcend the culture wars by critically engaging with the moral, political, and legal issues at stake and by becoming skilled participants in the respective debates. Students engage with some of the most important and controversial political issues of our time, and these issues will be approached by studying and comparing landmark judgments from the world’s most influential and powerful courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the U.K. Supreme Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. 

This course explores key concepts and recent advances in environmental economics with the view to addressing environmental policy questions. It is concerned with studying the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. Students capture work both on how economic growth can be made cleaner but also on how to mitigate the damages from this growth. The course illustrates how frontier theory and empirics from economics can be brought to bear on the key climate, environmental and energy challenges that face mankind. 

Students study the theoretical and practical aspects of financial markets, and learn how modern financial markets work. Engaging with leading faculty and your peers, students are introduced to modern investment portfolio management strategies covering topics such as diversification, asset allocation, portfolio optimization, the relationship between risk and return, factor models and equity valuation. Students also tackle some of the fundamental issues that arise in investment management, such as market efficiency, behavioral biases of investors, and market liquidity. 

This course covers a range of substantive topics and issues, such as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab-Israeli relations; the influence of non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah; regional balances between Saudi Arabia and Iran; and the 7 October 2023 war and its regional consequences. Students dive deeply into domestic political developments, including those that have emerged in the decade since the "Arab Uprising”. More broadly, the course places the region at the intersection of global and local politics, examining the roles played by the United States, Russia, and Europe.

This course provides some intellectual pathways from GY100. Human Geography is a broad subject and there may be changes in the particular topics from year to year. Topics to be discussed include Imperialism, East and West; contemporary geopolitics; concepts of “home” and Patriarchy; material aspects of globalization such as containerization and shipping; non-economic aspects of agglomeration in cities;  biopolitics and the geography of disease and viruses; the geography of affect or feelings; soundscapes and music.

The course provides an introduction to tax policy that links real-world debates about the tax system with ideas from a range of academic disciplines, including political theory, economics, and sociology, as well as law. It addresses real-world debates about tax policy as they appear in the media and in politics, but to do so in an academically rigorous way. The course adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on ideas from across the social sciences to address two main questions: why do we have the tax policies we have, and how can our current tax system be improved? The main examples will be taken from the UK and US contexts, but the insights generated are truly global.