Legal Studies

This course provides an analysis of EU law relating to migration. The module is divided into six parts. The first part covers the law relating to the free movement of EU citizens and their families. The course then explores the entry of non-EU (third country) nationals and aspects of the external borders control. The third part analyzes the legal migration of third country nationals including long-term residents, economic migrants and family members. Then, the course focuses on the Common European Asylum System. The fifth part deals with issues of irregular migration. Finally, the course examines the role of human rights provisions for the EU Immigration and Asylum Law. The main textbook for this course will be European Migration Law (2nd edition, Intersentia, 2014) by Pieter Boeles, Maarten den Heijer, Gerrie Lodder, Kees Wouters, although materials will also be used from the other assigned textbooks. Lectures will be enriched with articles and court decisions.

This course provides a critical overview of the functioning of intergovernmental organizations, with a specific focus on their relevance, role, and contribution in the face of a shifting global landscape. Through a series of case studies and scenarios, it introduces the broad notion of multilateralism and how to identify legal issues, analyze problems, and formulate an informed perspective on intergovernmental organizations.

The story of post-World War Two war crime trials was long told from a Western standpoint with attention mostly focused on a few highly publicized international trials. By contrast, in this course, the stress is on the transnational delivery of justice; the plurality of protagonists, including genocide/war survivors, involved in shaping it; the window into regime changes, evolving power hierarchies, and social and gender norms trials offer. The course builds upon a diversity of print, visual, and oral primary and secondary sources, including filmed trials and archival documents. It provides an opportunity to explore these complex sets of data as well as interact with former judicial investigators and scholars, invited as guest lecturers.

This course examines the structure and themes of Australian public law, providing a bridge to all other public law study in the curriculum. In essence, the course examines how public power is structured, distributed, and controlled in Australia. The distinctive roles played by the legislature, the executive and the judiciary receive special attention. Subsidiary themes in the course are protection of individual rights in the Australian legal system, and constitutional change and evolution in Australia. The following topics will be covered the constitutional and legislative framework for Australian public law; major concepts and themes in Australian public law, including federalism, separation of powers, constitutionalism, representative democracy, rule of law, liberalism and Indigenous sovereignty; the Legislature, including the structure of Australian legislatures, parliamentary supremacy, and express and implied constitutional limitations on legislative power; the Executive, including the structure of Executive government, executive power, and liability of the Crown; the Judiciary, including the constitutional separation of judicial power, and the administrative law implications of judicial separation; constitutional change and evolution, including constitutional amendment.

This course  explores how law and justice function in Japanese society. Beginning with the process of how the law was established, the course covers not only the court system, which is the core of dispute resolution, but also the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system; the legal profession; access to justice issues; the family and the law, and law and gender issues.  The course examines the Japanese legal system from a critical perspective and seeks an understanding of the characteristics of the Japanese legal system and its function in Japanese society. 

Each class will include a student discussion session and students will be asked to write brief comments during or at the end of each lecture. 

This course aims to provide students with a basic understanding of the interdisciplinary field of law and economics, as well as the ability to analyze social phenomena from a combined perspective of law and economics.  The first half of the course focuses on introducing fundamental theories in law and economics, while the second half involves a critical analysis of real-world legal cases in competition law from a law and economics standpoint. 

The first part of the course addresses the economic rationale underlying the creation and implementation of legal rules, enabling them to develop their critical thinking skills in designing efficient laws. Specifically, the study covers the economic reasoning behind areas of law such as property, tort, and contract, enhancing students' capacity to select the most efficient legal rules. 

The second part of the course examines real-world legal cases in the field of competition law, in various jurisdictions such as the US and the EU. Through these case studies, the class will observe the dynamic interaction between law and economics. Additionally, through comparative analysis, the class will gain insights into how to design laws that are best suited for specific societies by taking relevant circumstances into account.

This course covers the development of public administrations during the 18th and 19th centuries. It addresses the ways in which government impresses political will onto the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and how, inversely, society shapes government. It is both a course in history and public law. The course draws attention to the centuries of social evolution and legal tinkering behind many habitual features of our contemporary “bureaucratic” administrations. It explores several administrative systems across the Atlantic and Europe, namely that of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. Each session begins with the commentary of a visual document relating to aspects of a period's daily life containing cues to the legal and institutional context. The rest of the session consists of a brief lecture and a primary sources discussion. Sources are provided in a reader and mostly consist of historical legal documents.

Using Roman society and criminal law as an example, this course explores the impact of socio-cultural values on the concept of condemnable behaviors, judgment, and punishment.

For this advanced research seminar, students choose the topic of their research paper from the range of processes, legal innovations and socio-legal practices that took place within Germany in any period of choice from 1933 to today. The seminar will be held as a block when students will present the elaborated papers with a seminar presentation. The prerequisite for participation is the prior attendance of a lecture on “State Crime Criminology, Transitional Justice, and the Nazi Regime.” Students will write a 20-page seminar paper, give a seminar lecture, and participate in the discussion of the other students’ presentations.

This course explores the main concepts and principles of international environmental law. It looks at how international environmental law has emerged and developed, in particular by emphasizing the role and contribution of international courts and tribunals. The course also deals specifically with the legal regimes that have been shaped in order to preserve the global environment in different fields (climate change, biodiversity, desertification, water, ozone, chemical products, air pollution, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnologies). With the emergence of the concept of sustainable development, international environmental law is now at the crossroads of different regimes. In this context, the course analyzes the relationship between international environmental law and international trade (and/or investment) law as well as the relationship between international environmental law and human rights.