Legal Studies

Students examine the legal standards that govern the state’s power to control, coerce, and punish those suspected (or proven) to have committed crimes. Students also explore how these laws are exercised by legal actors, including police, prosecutors and judges in their routine decisions and practices. The course speaks directly to the real-world issues and controversies encountered by criminal justice systems in many developed democracies today – racial injustices, abuses of police power, mass incarceration, penal populism, law’s potential to reform organizations, to name but a few.

This course provides a solid foundation in corporate finance law covering three components. The first component is an introduction to corporate finance theory, which covers the nature of equity and debt as well as an introduction to how capital markets work and the theories of capital structure and valuation. The second covers the regulation of legal capital, including the relevant core accounting concepts, the regulation of dividends and share buy-backs. The third addresses the issuance of debt and equity, and related aspects of securities regulation such as insider trading and disclosure regulation, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

The course explores some of the principles and doctrines underlying the criminal law. It investigates some of the theoretical (and particularly, ethical) problems that criminal law raises. The course increases students’ understanding of many of the principles underlying the criminal law, especially those concerning the scope of criminal prohibitions and the criteria for attributing responsibility and blame to individual wrongdoers. With increased understanding of those principles, students learn to integrate analysis of general issues and principles with argument about particular rules and doctrines in the criminal law.

This course examines the relationship between crime and the media. It encourages students to develop an understanding of how the media help to influence the public views of crime and criminalization. It will do this by focusing on media portrayals of crime and criminal behavior, media effects and theories of media and communication.

This course examines through three case studies how we should develop legal responses to the challenge of AI. Today AI is used by the police, other law enforcement agencies, and even by private citizens to build smart surveillance networks through the use of live facial recognition cameras and so-called “hot spot” policing. This has the potential to impact our privacy and personal data and risks bias and error in design and deployment. The use of AI in law enforcement is the first case study. The second, the deployment of AI in medical practice and treatment, raises questions of autonomy, consent, confidentiality, and liability. The third case study looks at how public authorities deploy AI in ways which impact all, including digital transformation of public administrative systems, the use of AI in the legal profession and the courts, and the deployment of AI at borders and to manage immigration. 

This course introduces a range of issues surrounding the dynamics of disputes and the advanced models of negotiation and mediation designed to aid in their resolution. The focus of the course, which draws on insights from a range of disciplines including law, anthropology, psychology, and economics, is on looking at contemporary dispute resolution theories across a range of settings. An important feature of the course is the way in which it examines the interface between theory and practice. Academic staff is joined by leading practitioners in exposing students to the everyday dynamics of negotiation and mediation.

This course examines the nature of crime in Australia and the different approaches to understanding criminal behavior. The course seeks to ground students with an understanding of the causes of crime, the major methods for measuring crime, as well as the dominant theoretical perspectives in the field of Criminology.

The focus of the course is on Intellectual Property Right (in a global perspective) since they are considered a growing part of the value adding process in companies and at the same time are a more important mean of competition, but also related rights such as rules and regulations of marketing and competition, secrecy, and IT rights. Other issues regarding the commercialization of an invention will be discussed in the course, such as questions regarding license agreements. The course also deals with areas such as IPR-strategies for companies, how to search and utilize the information in patent databases, and how to interpret agreements relating to intellectual property.

This course offers a concise introduction to the legal challenges relating to the international dimension of litigating commercial disputes, both before state courts and in arbitration. London being one of the most important centers for commercial litigation and arbitration in the world, the course focuses on the relevant English and European Union law, invoking experiences from other jurisdictions where useful.