Legal Studies

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.

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.

This course investigates the ties between resorting to criminal justice and the making of postwar international and domestic orders. The story of post-World War Two war crime trials was long told from a Western standpoint in a context where justice was (also) a way of waging the Cold War by proxy. Moreover, until recent years scholarly attention has predominantly focused on a few highly publicized international trials, especially the Nuremberg and the Jerusalem trials, leaving in the shadows the diversity of legal proceedings that took place before national courts of law and failing to account for what was "a continent-spanning, decades-long, ever-evolving project" (Devin O. Pindas). This course departs from these perspectives in at least two ways: First, the course argues that trials for war crimes offer a fascinating window into several geopolitical, political and social processes. As arenas where a diversity of historical and social battles are being waged, they tell us about the crafting of regime changes, evolving power hierarchies, social norms, as well as the dominant social representations of gender at a given point in time. Second, national and international trials are shown to have been transnational in terms of the circulation of legal qualifications, material evidence, defendants, witnesses, and lawyers, as well as the entanglement between multiple legal proceedings. Three questions lie at the center of our investigations: Firstly, how can one account for the evolving conceptions of the role of justice in the management of postwar settlements and regime changes? Secondly, how can one shed light on the ways in which justice has been served – and has been seen to be served – since the end of World War Two? Thirdly, how have international and domestic trials of war criminals impacted the ways in which large scale violence is told by historians and remembered by victims and outsiders? In order to address these issues, this course provides a vision of justice attentive to the plurality of protagonists – legal as well as non legal professionals – that have contributed to its shaping, both within the judicial arena (prosecutors, judges, defense counsels, witnesses, translators, stenographers, etc.) and beyond it (Holocaust survivors, historians and archivists, journalists, political decision-makers, etc.). The assumption here is that a trial takes shape from the moment when the pretrial investigations are started and ends at the moment when the legal narratives are incorporated into ways of retelling and remembering war crimes. The course builds upon a diversity of oral, print and visual sources, including filmed trials and archival documents. Several scholars who have studied and/or taken part in legal proceedings for war crimes are also invited to share their insights with the students.

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.