Legal Studies

The course looks at financial institutions, including central banks, commercial banks, broker-dealers, money market funds, and hedge funds, as well as financial markets and their infrastructures. Students analyze the underlying business models as well as the legal and regulatory environment in which these institutions and markets operate. It also focuses on financial products, with a particular emphasis on money and money-like financial instruments. This includes the basics of finance theory, monetary theory, the money creation process, but also derivatives and repurchase transaction and the role they play in the modern economy.

This course provides students with a grounding in the foundational doctrines of European Union (EU) Law. It will focus both on the institutional and constitutional law of the EU and in particular on the processes of political and administrative decision-making, legislation, and adjudication. 

The course considers how AI changes the legal landscape and how lawyers, and anyone interested in how our society is regulated, needs to adapt to this new landscape. It does so by examining how AI automates processes based upon data, a process known as datafication, and how data is used to train, and the algorithms at the heart of AI. It asks how this impacts our data privacy and whether data protection law is ready to deal with this new wave of personal data exploitation. From here it moves on to examine who controls the development and deployment of these algorithms, and how we might control their development and deployment in AI systems. It concludes by examining the current legal framework for AI regulation and asks how we should regulate AI and which approach is likely to be effective. 

This course aims to provide introductory knowledge of competition law, which is a basic rule for business activities and the competition policy in Japan. The course covers the history of competition policy in Japan; the principles, structure, and terminology of the Anti-Monopoly Act;  unreasonable restraint of trade; private monopolization; unfair trade practices; merger regulation, and enforcement/procedure of Anti-Monopoly Act. 

This course explores the right to truth from an interdisciplinary perspective. It critically engages with truth as a right in transitional justice scenarios, focusing on the exploration of the construction of truth through law and its relation to justice. Through the foundational tenets of memory, reconciliation, and punishment, the course enquires into the assumed exceptionality of the right to truth in transitions, examining if and how it operates in ordinary settings. Simultaneously, the course offers an overarching view of the consolidation of the right to truth in the framework of international human rights, and the specific obligations it entails for states. Drawing on a broad variety of cases of ongoing and past transitional justice processes in the Global South, the course fosters challenging and critical perspectives on the right to truth as a legal claim.

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

This course examines the history of France from the Old Regime to the present day through a constitutional lens to provide a better understanding of current political events.

Drawing on a combination of philosophical, sociological, political, and legal scholarship, and taking a comparative and transnational approach, this course examines the role of law in the protection of individual liberty through the provision of civil and political rights. The course critically examines the nature and historical emergence of key civil and political rights, such as the rights to life, to liberty and security, to freedom from torture, to family life, and to hold an opinion, and the requirement for states to legislate against incitement to discrimination and torture. It explores how ideas about civil and political rights have been taken up and transformed at different historical moments and in a variety of geographical contexts. These issues are considered within a broader political framework which assumes that democracy is a necessary context for the fulfilment of civil and political rights. Case studies from recent international events are used to illuminate some of the key issues addressed in the course. 

This course provides both a first contact with the law and a critical reflection on it. It takes certain generalizations about the law that are often encountered in philosophy, politics, or economics, and shows that what may seem obvious is in fact more complex. Rather than presenting what the law is supposed to be or do, the course reveals its paradoxes by constructing problems dialectically. Course readings are chosen by preference from the corpus of philosophy and art (literature, cinema) to provide material for reflection and discussion that is common and interesting to all. It also addresses a few points of legal theory and technique to demonstrate the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of finding non-simplistic solutions. In all cases, the choice of texts demonstrates the diversity, even contrariness, of the opinions expressed and the theories elaborated, to avoid confirming unquestioned convictions.