Jinan Bastaki

What is Islamic law? What kinds of sources do we use to access Islamic law, and how has Islamic legal thinking and practice changed historically? This course introduces students to topics in Islamic law while addressing questions of continuity and change in the Islamic legal tradition from medieval to modern times. The first part of the course will introduce aspects of substantive Islamic law, including criminal and penal law, family law, and the law of war, through the eyes of a twelfth-century jurist's legal handbook. The second part will explore the diversity of Islamic law across chronological and geographic space, examining topics from classical jurisprudence to Ottoman constitutionalism, the encounter with colonialism and contemporary Islamic states.

This course analyzes the legal foundations, global politics and history of the conception, protection, and violation of human rights law. It presents analytical frameworks, concepts, facts, legal theories, and empirical methods used in the study of the politics of human rights law. It examines how democracy and democratization, international law and institutions, the activities of powerful democracies, and global civil society each influence human rights law around the world. It incorporates perspectives from the disciplines of law, political science, economics, history and sociology.

Refugees are considered a special type of migrant entitled to international protection. But who is the refugee in international law, and what types of protection are available? The international refugee regime did not develop in a vacuum but is directly related to the mass displacement that occurred as a result of the Second World War. However, the 1951 Convention has become central to refugee protection worldwide, with over 140 State parties to the Convention and/or the 1967 Protocol. Hence, we will become familiar with the 1951 Convention refugee definition, the way different courts have interpreted it, and assess whether this definition is appropriate considering the various reasons for forced migration, as well as exploring alternative refugee definitions. This course presents the key aspects of the international protection of refugees. It covers the historical development of international refugee law, the 1951 Refugee Convention, regional refugee frameworks, law and practice worldwide, the relationship between refugee law and other bodies of law, and broader questions of global refugee law and policy, particularly in light of the Global Compact on Refugees.

Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher

The course offers critical consideration of the role and relevance of international law in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and offers a nuanced exploration of questions of law, human rights, and social justice. The course will cover issues such as the international legal history of the conflict from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the 1947 UN Partition Plan to the 1967 Occupation and the Oslo Process of the 1990s. The course also examines the law of occupation, including the application of human rights to occupied territory, the status of the Wall, and Apartheid. Finally, the course will offer a critical assessment of mainstream and alternative solutions, and will end with an assessed class research conference.

This course examines the ethical issues raised by the function of law and lawyers in protecting individual rights and advancing the common good. The increasing globalization and transnational practice of law warrants a comparative perspective with regard to specific issues in legal ethics. Legal materials are drawn from a variety of jurisdictions, such as Australia, China, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in order to elucidate the relevant issues in legal ethics. Among the issues addressed are the legal profession and professional identity, trust, truth telling, confidentiality, conflict, client autonomy, access to legal services, cause lawyering, ethical breaches, and malpractice. These ethical issues in law are considered from a range of philosophical, cultural, social, economic, political, and religious perspectives.