Legal Studies

This course provides an overview of the basics of international law, including its history and legal sources. The course examines issues and disputes between nations through the basic structure and perspective of international law.

This course introduces the legal, regulatory, and policy issues raised by social media platforms. It provides an accessible overview of current legal issues relating to social media, with a focus on European law. The first half of the course examines how platforms and states govern online content. The second half broadens the focus to the legal and political issues raised by social media platforms' business models and ownership structures. The assigned readings and lectures provide a thorough overview of the core issues and encourage critical thinking about the underlying power structures and conflicts of interests that shape legal decisions.

This course explores the laws governing and/or related to the Internet and various forms of technology and spans numerous interrelated topics such as free speech, privacy, reproductive technologies and other medical and technological “wonders.” While the course draws extensively upon Anglo-American scholarship, legal texts, and case studies, it also introduces different philosophical foundations of free speech and other relevant concepts as various as privacy, property, and personhood, with the goal of providing conceptual tools for students to examine the laws and case studies in their home jurisdictions.

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.