Legal Studies

The undergraduate research program places students in research opportunites to conduct indpendent research under the supervision of a Chinese University of Hong Kong faculty. Students are expected to spend approximately 15 to 20 hours per week in independent research as well as attend lectures and labs.

This course is an introduction to the field of public international law. The course covers major topics in this field, including sources of international law (treaties and customary international law); subjects (States and international organizations); the law of State responsibility; the prohibition on the use of force; and international dispute settlement. The course emphasizes learning how to read and understand international law instruments, such as states multilateral treaties and judgments of the International Court of Justice. The course discusses topics including sources and subjects of international law, state responsibility, prohibition on the use of force, jurisdiction, immunities, international dispute settlement, and international human rights law.

In this course course, students learn to appreciate the interaction between self-regulation and statutory regulation; get a feel of how Rule of Law is different from specific laws; learn about the legislative process and how government is held accountable; explore how the judiciary shapes law through interpretation, oversight, and review, and discuss pragmatic and political concerns that animate policy-making.

The course provides students with a broad picture on the English law of contract. This course particularly focuses on leading cases of this area. However, main structure of law and major concepts are also discussed. Lecture topics include the negotiations for a contract; formation of the contract; form, consideration and intention; vitiating factors; fidning the terms of the contract; controlling the content; the doctrine of privity and the reform; change of circumstances; and remedies for breach of contract. Each student is expected to read some cases before each class begins and be ready to join the discussions.

This course is transdisciplinary in its framing and combines various approaches and scholarship from critical security studies, surveillance studies, sociology of technology, data sciences, human rights, and international law. The course develops a reflexive understanding of the main categories at work when using geopolitics, security and securitization, mass surveillance, and privacy rights, by joining different experiences too often fragmented by disciplinary knowledge. It analyzes the scripts they produce in order to build a transdisciplinary understanding reflecting the debates (or lack thereof) concerning digital spaces.

This course explores the ongoing negotiation of rights and responsibilities in the modern Western world as represented in both fiction and nonfiction works. It teaches how to evaluate and interpret texts using the standard conventions of literary analysis (a solid thesis statement, textual evidence, attribution of citations); identify and discuss strategies used in literary and rhetorical texts to comment upon and find meaning in the world; identify and discuss strategies that are used in literary and rhetorical texts to enact change in the world; and compare the discursive strategies used by thinkers from diverse disciplines to ask questions, interpret evidence, make arguments, and express emotions.

Surveillance is an ever-expanding practice, that criminologists need to be equipped to address and assess. This course explores the many dimensions of surveillance in the management of populations, including crime control. It walks through key surveillance theories, moving from classic models to more recent understandings that take into account new surveillance technologies, as well as practices of resistance to surveillance. Core themes include the relation between the surveillant and the surveilled; different forms of surveillance in many contexts, as well as the actors and tools involved; surveillance as crime control and how it influences police work; and the societal effects and the politics of surveillance. Each session combines theoretical concepts and relevant empirical case studies of surveillance practices and considers readings from criminology, critical security studies, media studies, as well as science and technology studies.