Legal Studies

This course discusses the role of law in organizing collective life, its legitimacy, its relationship with power structures, and its impact on social change. This course examines classical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the relationship between law and society and explores empirical studies and real-world cases that show how law operates in practice-- how it evolves alongside social changes and how it can both reproduce inequalities and open paths for resistance and transformation.

This course offers an introduction to civil law regulation in the tourism sector. It focuses on basic rules that regulate the different tourist and leisure activities, technical-legal terminology of the tourism sector, and interpretation of legal or contractual documents. 

This course focuses on the framework and practice of collective bargaining in Spain including how collective agreements are formed, their legal basis, and their role in regulating working conditions. It examines negotiation processes, conflict resolution methods, and key issues such as equality, labor rights, and the balance between workers’ and employers’ interests. 

Pre-requisites: Trade Union Law 

This course offers a study of the basic institutions, essential regulation, global perspectives, and basic principles governing financial market law. It discusses the organization and functional concepts of accounting and finance. The course is divided into four parts: an introduction to financial market law; securities; banking; insurance.

Pre-requisites: Commercial Law 

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).