Legal Studies

This course introduces climate change law and policy. It examines climate change as a disruptive legal phenomenon, exploring how it is framed and how legal systems have responded to it. It provides a foundation in climate law and policy across international, EU, and selected national legal orders. It covers also climate litigation, including the growing importance of judicial adjudication and the role of courts in climate governance. Building on this foundation, the course then examines specific climate measures in greater depth, including carbon markets, greenhouse gas removal technologies, and critical raw material mining. Finally, it addresses greenwashing and the risks it poses to the credibility and effectiveness of climate action.
 

The course provides an introduction to maritime law and aviation law, examining how maritime and air transport have been regulated internationally. It examines how the law responds to the challenges these critical sectors of the global economy are faced with, such as climate change, the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence (e.g. autonomous vessels and drones), external shocks (e.g. sanctions and trade wars) and an unlevel playing field. The course concludes with a comparative analysis of the international regulation of shipping and aviation.

The course covers the connection between international corporate taxation and sustainability within the frameworks of law, economics, and politics. The course topics include a range of relevant perspectives in an engaging narrative, including political challenges related to tax and sustainability (e.g. initiatives from governments and international organizations) as well as corporate challenges (e.g. how to align corporate strategies with sustainable strategies, and how to communicate tax behavior to interested parties). This is a digital, distance course consisting of a large number of video lectures, quizzes, and the writing of an individual paper.

Does the law protect or undermine our freedom? Which legal doctrines govern our speech, assembly, property, and personal autonomy?

This course offers the opportunity to explore these questions and more through an introduction to the legal dimensions of freedom. This course is a journey from philosophical foundations - negative and positive liberty, republican theories, and the rule of law - to concrete frameworks in areas such as civil liberties, economic rights, and digital autonomy. The course sharpens legal research and critical analysis skills, helps students engage with case studies and simulations, and produce essays that interrogate how concepts of liberty shape contemporary law.

The course would be especially beneficial for students looking ahead to postgraduate study in Law, or to careers or further study in Law, Politics, or Public Policy.

The course introduces students to philosophical thinking about the justification of state authority and coercion, to familiarize students with the main methodological, conceptual, and normative issues in the study of political obligation, to teach students about some of the most influential political philosophers and their theories of the state, to encourage and enable students to think critically about the role of ideas such as consent, natural rights, or associative obligation following ideas in justifying political authority, and to help students to develop advanced reasoning skills by training them in abstract, philosophical arguments. The themes that the course covers include anarchism; libertarianism; perfectionism; the consent or social contract tradition; the associative obligation tradition; and democratic and critical (Marxist) theories of the state.

The EU is central to all of the most pressing challenges that we face: migration, environment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rule-of-law backsliding, AI regulation. It is the biggest and most ambitious experiment with governance beyond the state. This course focuses on how the EU works, and how it has navigated the tension between, on the one hand, the commitment to "do things together," solve collective problems by cooperation and the creation of institutions beyond the state, and, on the other hand, the desire for domestic self-rule, national interests and political identities. It covers the basic institutional, constitutional, and substantive discussions that animate EU law and that influence the EU-UK relationship. It covers the EU law aspects of the GLD and SQE. The course is composed of two parts. In the first weeks, students look at the EU’s institutional and legal structure. It covers the legislative process, the judicial institutions and the doctrines that are central to its legal order. The second part of the course moves from questioning how the EU works to what it actually does. 

The course examines alternative methods of resolving legal disputes outside traditional court proceedings. Students examine the nature and dynamics of conflict, approaches to conflict management, and the legal frameworks governing negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms. The course explores the advantages, limitations, and legal consequences of various dispute resolution processes, with particular attention to selecting the most appropriate method for different types of conflicts. Through case studies, simulations, oral presentations, and practical exercises, students develop skills in negotiation, mediation, conflict analysis, and dispute resolution strategy.

Money is not just an economic tool: it is a form of power shaped by law. This course uncovers how the legal architecture underpinning the euro structures monetary policy, markets, and sovereignty. By analyzing the design of the Eurosystem and the role of the ECB, students learn to see monetary law as a crucial arena in which the dynamics of integration, power, and inequality are structured and contested. Combining legal analysis with political economy and history, the course equips future policymakers to think (critically) about monetary governance.

This course presents the issues associated with tax fraud from both a budgetary and financial point of view and from a political and democratic point of view. By using and abusing legal loopholes, tax fraud threatens the rule of law. Governments must find ways of ensuring that the rule of law prevails over the lure. After a brief introduction and presentation of the main actors in this field, the course is divided into three parts: tax fraud as a breach to fiscal justice; tax fraud as a threat to public order; foreseeable solutions. The European Union is the main area of analysis, although extra-European comparisons may be made during this seminar.

This course offers an introduction to the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. It covers the Court's role within the broader framework of international justice, its history, legal structure, and organs, the sources of law it applies, and the procedures governing contentious cases and advisory opinions. The course also introduces incidental proceedings, enforcement, and requests for revision of judgments. It involves an analysis of the Court's current docket and of its jurisprudence through the study of landmark cases that have shaped its history and the history of international law more broadly.