Legal Studies

This course centralizes the use of feminist legal theory as a serious mode of inquiry into analyzing law, legal reasoning, and legal reform. It studies four dominant strands of contemporary feminist legal theory, including liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, critical race feminism, and postmodern feminism in queer theory. While this course focuses on common law-based perspectives of feminism, it uses these diverse terrains of feminist legal thought in order to analyze challenges and various areas in social and public discourse internationally. Thus, while the first part of the course is dedicated to acquiring the useful knowledge and background of strands of feminism, the second part of the course creatively applies these tools in practical areas of sex equality issues in employment, consent, abortion, transgender rights, prostitution, and pornography.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course advances the student's knowledge in the main criminological approaches explaining the relationship between crime, culture, and media; they will be able to critically analyze media narratives and recent crime, deviance, and control phenomena emerging in digital societies, relying on contemporary examples and on the related scientific literature.

The course explores the intersection between crime and the media, with particular attention to how deviance and criminality are represented across various mediums, including television, newspapers, cinema, literature, and social media. It also examines criminologically significant phenomena that characterize contemporary digital society, such as digital vigilantism and the spread of fake news. The course fosters a critical and sociological approach among students toward the narratives, images, and phenomena of deviance, crime, and social control that are constructed and reproduced through the media.

In the first part of the course, students are introduced to the main theoretical frameworks developed within criminology in the broad field of crime and media studies, with a particular focus on traditional media. The second part addresses forms of deviance, criminality, control, and harm specific to today’s digital society, drawing on examples from recent literature in digital criminology. The third part focuses on what can be considered ‘classic’ themes within the cultural criminology of media, such as the criminalization of music (and other creative cultural expressions), representations of policing in literature and television, and the phenomenon of trial by media.

The course thematizes how the law shapes the contemporary organization of the political economy and how the ever changing political economy in turn shapes legal change. Based on Karl Polanyi's classic scheme, the course focuses on three pillars of the political economy - labor, nature/land and money - which Polanyi famously and influentially identified as the three 'fictitious commodities'. The first part of the course provides an in-depth overview of how the main authors of modern political economy understand the role of law in the economy (namely: Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek). Parts two, three, and four are devoted to an extended analysis of the legal regulation of labor, money and land/the environment.

This course examines theories, concepts, forms and practices of law in contemporary Australian society. It looks at the ways that "harm" is constructed as a legal category and encourages students to ask who is able to name something as either harmful, or not worthy of state intervention, and how this capacity to name effects socio-political relations. To develop this analysis, the course discusses the norms that underpin the capacity to name particular practices as harmful, and engages critically with certain historical and current harms. Examples of such harms might include treachery, riot and disorder, terrorism, payback, the Northern Territory Emergency Response, torture, sadomasochistic sex acts, or female circumcision.

This course examines the social and economic justifications for intellectual property rights as well as their multi-layered regulation. Drawing upon a selection of domestic intellectual property regimes, this course shows the impact of international and European law and decision-making on EU Member States and critically evaluates some of the policies and goals that underlie today’s intellectual property. Although the idea of multi-level regulation of patent and copyright laws goes back to the end of the 19th century, intellectual property rights and their enforcement have been globalized more effectively since the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1994 and the related adoption of an international agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (known as the ‘TRIPS’ Agreement). The course provides an in-depth examination of the most important provisions of this Agreement and of other international intellectual property conventions, as well as EU regulations and directives that sought to harmonize (or in certain cases even unify, as in the case of trademarks and designs) national legal systems such as the Irish one.

This course introduces the study of law and the principles which constitute the foundation of studies in law. This course provides general outlines of issues related to current law, including the Constitution, and the basis of legal philosophical principles. 

Students are introduced to a basic understanding of the concept and ideology of law: Based on the philosophical and theoretical background of what law is and why it exists, legal ideologies such as justice, freedom, and order are explored.  

Students learn the basic structure and concepts of major positive laws such as the Constitution, civil law, and criminal law, and based on this, they directly analyze simple cases to develop legal thinking. 

The course also covers career exploration of legal organizations. Students explore the roles and entry paths of various legal organizations, such as judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, and presents practical prospects for career paths that connect law majors. 

This course covers basic theories and contemporary issues of Human Rights Law across international, national, and transnational dimensions. Important themes and questions in the fields are explored by closely examining cases from various jurisdictions and critically engaging with global academic literature. Active class participation, including one class presentation, is expected. This is a discussion-based seminar course, but a few lecture sessions may be provided as necessary.  

Topics include ideas of human rights, transnational approaches to human rights, human rights and state sovereignty, universality and particularity, non-citizens' rights and democracy, rights of social minorities, equality and discrimination, human rights in the new contexts of human existence. 

This course focuses on the legal responses to climate change in three contexts: international, comparative, and national laws. It begins with causes and effects of global climate change and the methods available to control and adopt to it. It then investigates the emergence of climate change regime and various policy tools nations employ, including emission trading, carbon tax, litigation, securities disclosures, and voluntary action. Relations with other legal regimes (e.g., human rights, trade, and environmental justice will also be examined. 

Topics include Climate change and international law, Evolution of United Nations climate change regimes, Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement, Paris rulebook, Climate governance beyond the UN, Net zero, Green New Deal, Energy and climate change, corporate responsibility, climate liability, plastic pollution.  

This is a special topics course in the field of law. It provides practical and theoretical knowledge through the exploration of a variety of legal topics and issues.

This course offers an overview of sociological approaches to law as social relationships and social institution. It gives an overview of theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues discussed in the Sociology of Law as a sub-discipline. The themes of the course include questions of justice, law enforcement, legal professionalism, everyday 'life' of law, social norms, and social change. These topics are scrutinised through both socio-legal and sociological methods. Drawing on theoretical approaches in legal studies, the course offers a variety of definitions of law that are then critically assessed with sociological tools. Hence, the broader question of the course is: What is law? What forms does the law take in our societies? How does law constitute the societies and do societies constitute the law? In other words, during the classes, we look at social, political, and historical aspects of the formation of justice as we know it.

The course covers literature in the Sociology of Law from classic authors (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) to contemporary debates (feminist jurisprudence, queer criminology, etc.).