Legal Studies

This course helps students put their studies and the law into context. The course supports students to feel comfortable studying law, knowledgeable about the global context of current legal education along with "laws" history of hierarchies, colonialism, and ecological violence. The course inculcates greater confidence in their personal capital and helps develop professional skills that they need to be successful after university. Students learn about study skills such as research and drafting; values such as professional legal ethics and reflective practice; and aspects of the profession such as the use of tech in law, and the complexity of seeking access to justice.

The course introduces students to selected topics in the legal application of medical scientific expertise. Through a historical perspective, students learn about the historical development and application of forensic investigation techniques such as toxicology, psychiatry, crime scene investigation and DNA profiling, and how they were presented to the public in various media (e.g. detective fiction, newspaper reports, forensic television dramas). Students consider who makes claims to forensic truth and what tools and techniques they use to arrive at that conclusion.

This course introduces critical legal thinking by studying the nature of “law” and providing an overview of “legal reasoning”.  The course addresses different issues and debates but focuses on the following questions:

• What is the role of law in our society?
• How does law justify itself?
• How does law relate to ethics and morality?
• What happens when opposing rights conflict with each other?
• What defines power in a juridical system?
• What are the strength and weaknesses of democracy?

This course aims at guiding students to a professional status as legal personnel. The course starts from training professional reasoning, students will learn and comprehend foundation knowledge of laws, including basic concepts, methodologies, and principles that serve as foundation for the entire legal studies system. The course cultivates students’ abilities to apply the theories, methodologies, and thinking of jurisprudence to identify, analyze, and solve the actual problems. Students will establish basic legal thinking skills, literacy, and sprits and beliefs as legal personnel. Teaching will emphasize on developing students’ subject consciousness, and guide them to combine in-class and extracurricular understandings to actively and independently read and think.

This is a seminar course designed to cover the common law trial systems through providing the students opportunities of analyzing cases, in-class discussions, and/or mock trial practices, and facilitation for the students to learn the main legal theories of litigation and trial practices of the common law system.

Through taking this course, the students are expected to learn legal terminologies, enhance the ability of comprehending legal English, and understand the common law trial proceedings in a systematic way. The students will be trained to use English as a tool to understand the law and to be capable of analyzing and resolving legal problems.

This course analyzes the structures and functions of international public law using the methodological and theoretical tools of political economy. Rather than treating law as an autonomous system of norms, the course interrogates how legal regimes emerge, operate, and evolve in relation to power, interests, and material structures at the international level. We examine how legal frameworks reflect and institutionalize global distributions of power, economic interdependence, and the strategic behavior of states and non-state actors. Topics include sovereignty, trade, development, human rights, investment law, and environmental regimes, with a focus on power asymmetries, institutional design, and enforcement. Adopting a political economy approach to analyzing law - and public international law in particular - has a number of analytical, critical and empirical advantages. It highlights underlying power relationships; the political economy approach enables one to understand who writes law, for whose benefit, and in what structural context (imperialism, capitalism, inter-state rivalry).

This course questions the place of researchers in the 21st century and law through the ethnographer's field. Is there such a field? The course introduces basic concepts of law and anthropology, human sciences, its colonial background and methodological critiques to further how lawyers can lean in and explore anthropology's paradigm of alterity to further critical legal thinking and how anthropologists and other social scientists can look at law as a cultural technique. The course discusses why using empirical work, sometimes uncomfortable for a researcher, similar to looking in the mirror, can contribute to better addressing today's ethical and political challenges. Through the revision of diverse examples, old and new, students learn about the method of “explorers."

This course will focus on the complicated role that law has played in the economic reform. It will analyze such a role from five perspectives, namely, constitution, government, property, regulation, and globalization. Together, these perspectives will help the students to build a multi-dimensional understanding of the political economy of law in modern China.

This course considers the limits and potential of using law to pursue justice and achieve social change. It looks at key goals of law reform (such as access to justice, rights and equality) as well as considers a different understanding of justice and what constitutes a just outcome. It focuses on the importance of the process of law reform and having an awareness of its social, historical, cultural and political dynamics, as well as the central role of community organizations in advocating for social and legal change. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, the student: is able to understand the fundamental philosophical issues raised by law and their significance; has knowledge of legal-philosophical conceptions in their historical development, from their origins to contemporary perspectives, and can reconstruct how these conceptions provide answers to these issues; can critically evaluate the theoretical advantages and limitations of the various conceptions; possesses basic notions of legal theory and the theory of legal interpretation. The course consists of two parts:

• The first part (Conceptions of Law) introduces the three main conceptions of legal theory – natural law theory, legal positivism, and legal realism – and discusses their theoretical implications; then, some contemporary trends (law and economics, critical legal studies, and legal feminism) are introduced and discussed, also in connection with the traditional views.
• The second part (Hart: The Concept of Law) discusses in details H. L. A. Hart’s masterpiece “The Concept of Law” and its Postscript, also in the light of some contemporary debates in legal theory that derived from it: particularly the Hart-Dworkin debate, but also the debate on inclusive and exclusive legal positivism (Raz on authority).