Legal Studies

This course introduces the new, interdisciplinary field of Corporate Sustainability Law, which identifies and analyzes the multi-layered regulatory framework that intends to promote corporate sustainability. Corporate sustainability concerns the contribution of business to sustainability, which is necessary if we are going to be able achieve overarching sustainability goals in this decade of action towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The course positions the discussion of business in the unsustainable reality of our time, and analyzes how business can create value in a sustainable way. Creating sustainable value is, amongst other things, contributing to the protection of human rights, ensuring decent work, and fair taxation. Sustainable value creation is also about contributing to mitigating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, and phasing out novel entities such as microplastics. It discusses sectors such as the energy sector, the food industry, and the fashion industry, as concrete examples of the unsustainability of business as usual. The course draws on extensive comparative company law and corporate governance research as a basis for analyzing and discussing these developments in the EU and the national developments, including the Norwegian Transparency Act (‘Åpenhetsloven’). The course provides a thorough understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the dominant and of newer, more progressive approaches to the company. The core themes of the course are corporate purpose, governance of the business (including of global value chains), and the evolving duties of the board.

The course is designed to equip students with experience, knowledge, and skills for succeeding in globally interdependent and culturally diverse workplaces. Throughout the course, students will be challenged to question, reflect upon, and respond thoughtfully to the issues they observe and encounter in the internship setting and local host environment. Students will have the opportunity to cultivate professional and personal development skills as defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Assignments focus on building a portfolio that highlights those competencies and their application to workplace skills. Students complete 45 hours of in-person and asynchronous online learning activities and 225-300 hours at the internship placement.

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.