Legal Studies

This course analyzes current aspects of digital markets and the relationships between market participants - suppliers, consumers, and digital platforms. It examines the implications on consumer protection that arise within digital environments. Special focus will be on European law with emphasis on comparative aspects with US law. Topics include: consumer protections, consumer law, and behavior problems in consumer law; European Data Protection; E-marketplaces; technology and digital markets; contracts and data.

More and more companies and government agencies find themselves in the press and courtrooms for data privacy and security law violations. Given the rapidly increasing technological options to collect and commercialize personal data, this area of the law is rapidly growing. This course will prepare law students for the challenges and opportunities of international data privacy law, with a particular focus on United States Federal / California privacy law and European Union / German data protection law. Objective of the lectures is to familiarize students with the typical legal problems arising from the conflicting interests in data and privacy in today's global economy and society, in particular in the areas of law enforcement, commerce, media and employment. The significance and practical relevance of domestic, international and foreign national laws is rapidly increasing for individuals, government officials, business people, attorneys, judges, and legislators around the world. We will look at how data processing and laws affect individual privacy in the various areas, including government and private surveillance, press reporting, commercial treatment of financial, health and communications information, and direct marketing. Topics covered include common law, constitutional and statutory rights and obligations regarding data privacy, data security and legal protection for databases under California, U.S. Federal, European Union, public international and other countries' laws, including, for example, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, rules on spamming, wiretapping, homeland security surveillance, and employee monitoring.

This course focuses on international refugee law and migration law, mainly in the realm of forced migration, as it is one of the pressing and large-scale challenges facing global society. The course introduces students to law, institutions, policies, practice, and contemporary debates concerning global refugee and migration governance. It adopts international law, international relations, and politics as general disciplinary frameworks.  

It is highly recommended (though not required) for students to have taken the courses on International Law I and II before registering for this course.   

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides knowledge of the multilateral trade system (the WTO system) and international investment law. The course teaches the ability to recognize the interests underlying those rules and legal instruments to enforce them, especially through the dynamics of argumentation emerging from international litigation. The course contains: an overview of the WTO system; the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO; the most favored nation clause; the national treatment principle; GATT Article XX trade & non-trade values; the WTO TBT Agreement; the precautionary principle and the SPS Agreement; the New Government Procurement Agreement; the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs); China in the WTO; DSM the cases concerning natural resources; WTO and climate change; WTO and energy; the new generation of EU Free Trade agreements; principles of non discrimination and of fair and equitable treatment; direct and indirect expropriation; interpretation and application of investment treaties; investment dispute settlement mechanisms; transparency in investment arbitration proceedings; investment and sustainability issues; and protection of foreign investment, environmental, and human rights protection. For students who have not previously attended a course on International Law, it is advised to read Jan Klabbers, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

This course covers a variety of environmental issues and how international law addresses them. Students will understand different treaties and customs and how States interact regarding environmental issues. The course utilizes lectures, discussion of case studies, and presentations to consider the extent to which environmental law is effective, current challenges, and the future of environmental protection. 

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 provides, through a comparative and international perspective, an understanding of: the criminal justice system and its changes introduced through the processes of internationalization and Europeanization, at the same time highlighting the importance of the comparative approach; the constitutional principles in criminal matters and the foundational concepts of criminal law, the structure of its main principles and categories, the punishment and the classification of different penalties; and the European criminal law developments, both regarding the legislation and the case law, as well as its influence on national criminal justice and law systems. Throughout this course, the theoretical framework is analyzed in the light of judicial decisions of national Constitutional Courts, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights and, finally, the International Criminal Court. This course provides a general understanding of the international framework, the European criminal law, and the complex issues relating to the relationship between criminal law and human rights. The first part of the course examines the most important provisions of international criminal law. The course uses both the comparative method and the analysis of (national and international) leading cases, in order to show empirical examples of the various issues related to the protection of human rights.

This course will teach students to recognize, assess, and generate evidence-based crime policies across a range of contexts and criminal justice domains such as police, courts, and corrections. This will include a focus on how government and non-government agencies can develop "upstream" responses; that is policies and programs that aim to prevent crime before they become "downstream" problems requiring responses by the criminal justice system. This requires an evidence-based approach that emphasizes problem solving and analysis. Topics will include program design and evaluation and the course will cover various crime prevention approaches such as crime prevention through environmental design, situational crime prevention, social prevention, and developmental crime prevention.

This course equips students with an in-depth understanding of what competition law entails, alongside the broader policy issues that it raises. The focus is the structure and substance of the EU competition rules with a comparative assessment of other competition systems, particularly the laws of the United States. Since most competition systems globally borrow from one or both of these jurisdictions, the intention is to provide students with the necessary understanding and skills to address antitrust problems wherever in the world they arise.

Intellectual property is at the core of all modern economies. Digital technologies are shaped by rights of creators and inventors, and the licensing practices that have evolved around these rights. Thus, understanding what intellectual property rights protect is indispensable to understand the world around us. This course introduces the intellectual property law system and its role in forming the building blocks of the modern economy.

This course offers a dynamic exploration of the current and emerging regulatory frameworks guiding Digital Finance or FinTech. It closely examines how laws and regulations across key markets, including the UK, EU, and US, are adapting, striving for a balance between fostering innovation and mitigating risks.