Your Masters will culminate in a dissertation. This is an extended project of enquiry into an area of your own choice. You'll create knowledge in answer to a question which really intrigues you.

While you'll be very much in the driving seat, your work is nurtured and guided by a member of our academic staff team. You'll be guided by some of the world’s foremost experts.

60 credits

This module supports students writing an enhanced research proposal, with a view to supporting their transition into PGR study (PhD/MPhil studies) and creating an early research supervision relationship with a prospective supervisor.

60 credits

This module gives students the opportunity to apply to pursue an internship in a national or international organisation relevant to their course. The internship allows students to be placed in a relevant host organisation for a specified number of hours agreed with the Strathclyde tutor. The student will be responsible for producing an internship report which will include an account of the knowledge and skills attained applying theoretical concepts and with reference to discipline specific literature as well as an in-context self-reflective analysis of the experience, the organisation and the work undertaken enabling broader critical reflections on the student’s place in the professional world.

60 credits

This module gives students to apply to do independent work in the final semester of their LLM/MSc. Students will be required to identify and co-design the project supported by their Strathclyde mentor. The project report includes the response to the research question co-designed with a relevant host organisation as well as an in-context self-reflective analysis of the project, the organisation and the student’s experience in executing the work enabling broader critical reflections on the student’s place in the professional world.

This class seeks to examine a variety of difficulties and subject matters in the area of financial crime, such as money laundering, insider trading, and fraud.

This course will examine select topics in capital markets regulation and economic theories underpinning them, including the law and economics of disclosure, regulation of market abuse (insider dealing and market manipulation), and the function and regulation of the market for corporate control.

This course will explore the evolving nature and distinctive components of the international legal framework on climate change.

This module considers the law governing all forms of online commercial activity.  It focuses on two areas of particular importance:  electronic contracts and intermediary liability.  The constraints on contracting in an online environment are central to most e-commerce activities and are therefore of great importance to the growth of e-commerce.

Youth justice attracts interest across society, politically, socially and legally. Some issues – from the murder of two year old James Bulger in 1993 by two 10 year old children to the riots in 2011 in England – spark moral panic and demonstrate the extent to which such matters cut across disciplinary boundaries and influence legal and societal responses to children who offend.

Youth justice generates its own philosophical approaches eg in the welfare / justice debate. It also provides a context within which to examine broader issues affecting criminal justice as a whole such as the need to balance the rights of the accused against the public interest.

This class will provide an opportunity for you to critically examine some key aspects of youth justice law, policy and philosophy from a number of perspectives. Your learning will be supplemented by visits to custodial and innovative community settings, as well as a visit to and a simulation of Scotland’s unique system of ‘Children’s Hearings’ (a decision-making system based on the best needs of the child).

This class will introduce you to the foundations of public international law, including its subjects, sources, principles and measures of implementation. It will address how this body of law has evolved over time to address the needs of environmental protection in transboundary and global settings.  

It will also provide you with a basic understanding of how compliance and dispute settlement operate in international environmental law, with special focus on the environmental case law of the International Court of Justice. 

This module appraises the operation of environmental law from a ‘global’ perspective.  

Accordingly, seminars will assess the interactions and mutual influences between international, regional, national and sub-national legal processes (including the customary laws of indigenous peoples and local communities, and law-making by other non-state actors). This module also lends itself to explore and discuss critically theories, methods, and challenges of comparative environmental law in a genuinely global perspective. In so doing, it attempts to contribute toward decolonising the curriculum of environmental law teaching, emphasising current and historical injustice at the root of environmental conflicts throughout the world. 

In the past half-century, the scope of international law has increased dramatically. From a tool dedicated to the regulation of formal diplomacy, international law has expanded to deal with the most varied kinds of international activity, from trade to environmental protection, and from human rights to scientific and technological cooperation. Most of this expansion has taken place through international treaties and institutions. International environmental treaties provide a case in point, both in terms of their relationship with other fields of international law (e.g., international trade law) and in terms of the relationship between its constituent parts (i.e. the various geographically and functionally limited regimes that make up its corpus).  

This module will provide an overview of global and regional environmental treaty regimes. It will explore the causes, manifestations, and implications of this deficit, and the ways in which policy coherence, mutual supportiveness, and synergies in implementation can be promoted. 

This class will focus on developing an understanding of the rationale for EU competition law and policy, the substantive rules and the processes of enforcement.

Google, TikTok, Amazon. Digital services have become an integral part of our lifestyle. While the digital economy is here to stay, it also brought a plethora of issues to the field of competition law.

This class introduces students to the fundamentals of digital business models and of competition law. We then discuss competition law cases concerning self-preferencing, disputes over data and digital content, privacy, the prevalence of ecosystems and new forms of economic power. In the last part, we explore the brand new ex-ante competition regulations that were shaped by the preceding case law: The EU Digital Markets Act and the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.

The western world’s “penal crisis” has, over the past thirty years, posed specific challenges to the reform tradition.

In this module we explore the nature, dimensions and national permutations of that crisis, putative solutions to it and likely obstacles to their realisation. We draw on theoretical developments in the study of justice and punishment and explore their potential to illuminate and inform processes of progressive penal change.

The module examines contemporary changes, international evidence and policy transfer, and technological challenges and considers reform across the globe. The module draws on insights and perspectives including law, the sociology of punishment, history and the social sciences

Learning is conducted through a range of innovative methods such as debates and media representations. The module is supplemented by visits to key institutions' prisons, women’s justice centres, as well as conferences with key practitioners and policy makers.

Recent years have witnessed major developments in international criminal justice, with the establishment of not only of ad hoc but also hybrid international criminal tribunals and, ultimately, the permanent International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Justice module provides you with an opportunity to develop a deep, critical awareness of those various legal, social, and political strategies, mechanisms, and institutions that have been developed to deal with crimes with an international or trans-national dimension and of the new challenges that are emerging across the contemporary world. You'll engage critically with the philosophy and history of international criminal justice, as well as the legal frameworks, enforcement mechanisms, and contemporary developments in the arena of the prosecution of international crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression, and torture). There's a particular focus on the role of courts and tribunals and the key issues, debates, and challenges facing the implementation of these kinds of prosecutions, including the possibility of alternative forms of response.

In spite of the widespread presence of intellectual property in law schools, in industry and the media, even basic issues in intellectual property remain misunderstood. This module, by providing students with the skills and information to navigate a world of intellectual property protection, will consider cutting-edge technologies, such as machine learning and generative AI, and enable students to effectively protect and assert their rights as well as avoid liability for infringing those of others.

The potentially maleficent impact of digital technologies on human rights creates a real urgency for understanding this connection, but there is also a pressing need to study these technologies’ beneficent effects on human rights, an area that is garnering growing attention from human rights researchers and NGOs. Emerging scholarly discussions on the development of digital human rights, or on the hybridisation of public and private governance of digital technologies and attending debates on the vertical and horizontal effects of human rights law, will also be addressed in this class.