Legal Studies

The institutional law of international organizations comprises those rules of law that govern their legal status, structure, and functioning. This course explores core issues in this field, including international legal personality and the powers of international organizations, their decisions and decision making, and the control of and by international organizations, including dispute settlement. After a thorough study of the selected issues, those issues are analyzed more in-depth with regard to one or more international organizations, such as the UN and WTO. Whilst the first half of the course focuses on international organizations in general, the second half of the course focuses on the European Union. Both parts of the course address the same issues. In studying the selected topics, the courses explores the historical context and the societal forces that explain their existence. The tension between the intergovernmental and supranational method of cooperation serves as a leitmotiv throughout the entire course.

This course covers the formation of contracts and the content of contracts, as well as the inequality of bargaining power and exclusion and limitation clauses. It discusses the restrictions on contractual freedom (misrepresentation, and duress and undue influence) and reviews frustration and breach and remedies.

This course focuses on the main features of the law of contracts in various legal systems of the world while examining their commonalities and main differences. Students develop a proper understanding of the relevant legal systems and gain insight into various other legal systems. Students analyze various legal systems with the correct method in order to look for corresponding rules in the foreign system. This course also draws attention to the most important instruments of harmonization of contract law on an international level. The course emphasizes the contract law of the common law and the civil law legal families, which are divided into Romanistic, Germanic, and Nordic systems, with references also to the system of the Former Soviet Union and the process that this is undergoing.

This course explores the English legal system and the law of contract as they apply to business. The course focuses on the role of law in enabling the conduct of business generally, its regulation, and the achievement of commercial aims. Topics include the English legal system, sources of law, the system of courts and alternative dispute resolution, formation of contract law, misrepresentation, and breach of contract.

This course examines the legal relationship between employers and workers acting collectively through unions and unions and their members. In relation to the employer/union relationship, students examine the law relating to collective bargaining, including statutory regulation of collective bargaining and the legal status of collective agreements, and the law on trade disputes, including liability for engaging in industrial action and legal immunities available to participants in such action. In relation to the union/member relationship, students examine how the law regulates the formation of this relationship, the legal incidents of the relationship, and the termination of the relationship.

The course introduces common law systems, with a particular focus on the English legal system. It introduces students to the various forms of law-making found in these systems, and methodologies for legal reasoning. Attention is given to the development of legal skills that are foundational for the LLB program.

This course offers an exploration and overview of public international law, the legal system that aspires to order human affairs at the international level. It introduces students to methodologies and ways of reasoning that are relevant to those who are likely to encounter legal issues in their future endeavors.

This course familiarizes students with the history and structure of core agencies of the English criminal justice system (CJS). Students study the branches of English law, the structure of the criminal justice system, the police, and the court and probation system.

This course introduces students to Law and Development, a discipline combining legal and economic analysis to understand what brings development about. It deals with topics such as third world economic nationalism, human rights and “rule of law” reforms, the proper role of government intervention in the economy, trade and monetary policies, and the relation between inequality and development. The course is divided into four parts, dealing with the dominant development approach in four periods: (I) the interventionist and nationalist policies of 1945-1980; (II) the free-market Washington Consensus that took over in the 1980s; (III) the center-left Post-Washington Consensus of the 1990s that grew out of critiques of austerity programs; and (IV) the return of interventionism and nationalism in the 2000s and 2010s, in the wake of the rise of China and other East Asian countries. Each period uncovers the legal ideas that lie behind dominant economic approaches.