Legal Studies

Laws have deeply affected the lives of minority groups in the U.S., and have been a source of both empowerment and deprivation. This course examines some of the U.S. laws and legal issues surrounding minorities, with attention to historical, political and social contexts, focusing on African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, women, and LGBTQis.

This course provides a basic overview of Israel's legal system, its core principles, and its central institutions. The course focuses on the development of Israel's law since the founding of the state; important issues, including politics, affecting Israeli law; and the Israeli approach to specific and focused fields of law. The course aims to introduce the fundamentals of Israel's legal system, important developments and key jurists since the founding of the state, and discuss specific areas of law in Israel.

This course explores freedom of expression as a fundamental right in democracies. It first introduces different philosophical foundations of free speech, before comparing the American free speech tradition with other Western traditions, including Germany and the United Kingdom. It also examines the legal limits of free speech and other less direct forms of speech restriction and looks at the regulations of free speech in work settings and universities. The course draws extensively upon Anglo-American scholarship and utilizes legal texts and examples from various Western countries.

Various cross-border commercial disputes are frequently resolved by arbitration in London. London is home to a wide range of arbitral institutions, and it boasts a wealth of talented arbitration professionals. This course concerns the contractual and procedural elements of international commercial arbitration both from comparative and practical perspectives, focusing particularly on the English Arbitration Act 1996, the UNCITRAL Model Law, and the New York Convention. Arbitration agreements frequently refer to a specified set of arbitration rules to govern the arbitral procedure.

This course examines dominant perceptions of law in Malay society by focusing on ideas on adat law and Islamization of laws. It analyzes socio‐historical factors conditioning perspectives and the function of ideas in relation to social groups that espouse them. The extent to which the mode of thinking on adat law is reflected in discourse on Islamizing laws and its impact on legal development will be addressed. Concepts of ideology and Orientalism, Islam and adat law, Ideas on Islamization of laws and Shariah and the state are some major themes tackled.

This course is designed to provide students with an introductory understanding of Anglo-American law. It starts with a detailed discussion of the establishment of modern judicial review and the workings of the United States Supreme Court. Next, general features in common law development and procedures are taught. The third part of this course is devoted to an understanding of how judicial power exercised in common law jurisdictions (particularly in the American federal legal system). Last, the course discusses some of the important developments in Anglo-American legal culture and education. 

This course studies civil procedure. It focuses on the organization and functioning of civil justice, including the organization of the court and the trial system. Topics include how cases (mostly non-criminal) are brought before a judge, the criteria for gaining an audience with a judge, the roles of various members of the court, and the general rules for conducting court proceedings.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the field of human rights by exploring and parsing out disagreement on divisive and polemical issues. The course analyzes how a variety of key issues of legal concern, such as hate speech, social welfare, dignity, the death penalty, and discrimination, are addressed by a variety of domestic and international institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the UN, and the Supreme Court of the United States. This course is predominantly legal in character, social scientific explanation and understanding are not the focus of the course. Rather, the course concentrates on analyzing the justification of legal decisions in accordance with legal rules and principles.