Legal Studies

This course focuses on the Supreme Court of Japan. The first part of the course presents the origin, structure, and functions of the Supreme Court. The second part of the course presents the role it plays in the Japanese legal system and provides an overview of the most important cases and decisions it has made. Depending on participants' interests and on the circumstances related to the Covid-19 pandemic, a class might consist of a field trip to the Supreme Court of Japan.

In examining how contemporary political power is organized, notably through constitutions, this course presents a view of issues past and present, legal and political, French or foreign, national and international.  It also offers several keys so that students can orient themselves among the facts, the information, and the documentary sources.  Students are given a certain amount of information but also encouraged to build intellectual and practical skills to bring out their critical thinking abilities, their ability to hold a rational argument, and stimulate their creative intellectualism.  The themes examined in the course include: defining a certain number of fundamental notions related to the analysis of constitutional law and the political institutions; examining several examples of foreign political institutions; and understanding the trajectory, the situation, and the characteristics of today’s French institutions.  Through case studies and applied examples, each course meeting is an opportunity to enrich the methodology required to examine these issues.

This course introduces students to the legal regulation of commercial relationships having strong connections with more than one legal system. Although the focus is on litigation before English courts, an international perspective is adopted. The implications of Brexit in jurisdictional and recognition rules are to be considered. The traditional English principles and rules concerning international commercial litigation form the basis of the law in many, primarily common law, jurisdictions and regained relevance in the light of Brexit. Emphasis is also be placed on the relevant principles and rules of European Union law applicable before the courts across Europe.

The course provides a general overview of the U.S. legal system. It introduces students to the concept of common law and covers constitutional law (incl. the legislative process and its political implications), the U.S. court system as well as selected areas of substantive and procedural U.S. law, such as contracts, torts, criminal, and corporate law. The course is taught through a combination of lectures and in-class discussions and encourages active participation in order to acquire and practice legal terminology.

This course covers gender issues such as employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. The course explores how feminist legal theory has questioned the way the law is constructed and applied according to certain stereotypical views of sexual identity and the roles of women. The seminar also investigates how queer theory has influenced the legal field by rejecting traditional gender identities which do not fully encompass the issues that concern the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual population. Students use a comparative perspective to consider what can be learned from these different legal standpoints as we encounter changes in family law and employment law, how queer theory influences gender law, and what might be new ways to consider legal concepts such as consent, personal autonomy, and discrimination.