Legal Studies

This course provides basic knowledge of various areas of law, mainly private law, public law, and criminal law, which are relevant in everyday life. 

This course examines the legal aspects of forensic science. It covers principles of criminal law, principles of evidence and procedure, expert evidence, interpretation of scientific evidence, probability and statistics.

1. Through teaching, students will have a preliminary understanding of the legal provisions, institutional design, and theoretical perspectives of China's tort law.
2. Enable students in class to have a preliminary understanding of the constituent elements of tort liability, which can be used to analyze cases and solve practical problems.

The first part is the General Principles of Tort Law (General Tort), including: the scope of protection in tort law, the principle of liability attribution, the constituent elements of general torts, and the reasons for reducing and exempting liability; The Distribution Rules of Majority Tort Liability

The second part is the specific provisions of the Tort Law (special torts and typical torts), including: guardian's liability, employer's liability, network tort liability, tort liability for violating security obligations, tort liability of educational institutions, and medical liability

Liability for medical damage, environmental pollution, high risk, animal husbandry damage, object damage, etc.

This interdisciplinary course provides a modern history of AI from a global perspective and describes AI's complex and multifaceted relationship with its social and economic surroundings. It discusses legal issues concerning artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which include addressing harm from robotics and other autonomous systems; fairness and transparency of classification models; fair machine learning; explainable AI; privacy-preserving data mining and analysis; pricing agents and the market mechanism; lethal autonomous weapons; interplay with digital service laws; the systematization of the legal system through AI; AI as methodology of legal research, etc.

This course provides an introduction to the basic principles of public international law as it applies in our modern world. It focuses on how the governance of our global system is being shaped through international law and policy. The course analyzes the interface of international law and governance through the prism of such issues as internal unrest, dispute resolution, climate change, globalization, development, terrorism, use of force, pirates, cyberlaw, torture, human rights, genocide, the United Nations, the World Bank, and non-governmental organizations. 

The course familiarizes students with the basic principles of law, so that they can apply them to a wide range of commercial transactions, in the light of the policy objectives that legal regulation pursues, and with an understanding of the context of commercial transactions in which the law operates. 

This course outlines the structures of the European Union, its law-making processes, judicial architecture, and its most important policy domains. It does so by focusing on both the law of European integration and the political, social, and cultural context within which it operates. Students tackle questions about the dynamics and direction of integration, including the existential challenges posed by Brexit, the rule of law crisis and the refugee crisis.

This course examines core issues facing entrepreneurs and tech startups in Hong Kong and elsewhere and the legal, regulatory and/or policy issues and consideration arising from these. It covers the pervasive role of law (domestic and cross-jurisdictional) in the context of ABCD of technology (namely AI, blockchain, cloud and data) and business models (such as digital assets and circular economies), as well as the importance of self-governance standards and ethics, especially where there is an absence of laws and regulations.

This course provides a study of the elements that pertain to the most significant criminal offences, as well as newly emerging crimes, through the analysis of relevant legal aspects. Emphasis is placed on the most important legally protected rights and the varying classes of offences. Topics covered include: crimes against life, integrity of body, and against the family; crimes against personal liberty and normal psychosexual development; patrimonial crimes; crimes against health and well-being; corruption of minors; crimes committed by public servants; crimes against the administration of justice; crimes against public faith; concealment and operations with resources of illicit origin; crimes against biodiversity and the environment.

This course studies what legitimate authority is, under what conditions states have it, how law participates in legitimate authority, and how philosophical issues about legitimate authority are represented in positive law. It provides a grasp on the philosophical debate on legitimate state authority that can be applied in practice as jurists.