This course considers everything from the theory of why and how someone is held responsible for criminal actions, to many specific crimes, including murder, the less serious crimes of personal violence, crimes of dishonesty, breach of the peace and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

This class engages with some challenging problems faced by law within contemporary society. It introduces students to some aspects of the social, political, and ethical conditions in which law operates. It deals with the interaction of law with justice, politics, morals and equality. The course will examine the role and challenges of law in times of social change. The course is structured around three key themes:

• legal reasoning
• law & politics
• law & social change

 

The aims of this class are to:

• provide students with a basic knowledge of the history, structure and institutions of the Scottish legal system
• provide students with the skills required to find, interpret and analyse the law applicable in Scotland, from all their various sources
• introduce students to competing conceptions of law
• introduce students to legal reasoning

While the most obvious aim of this course is to familiarise students with Scottish contract law and voluntary obligations, this aim may be divided into a number of sub-aims. They are as follows:

• to place voluntary obligations within the general framework of Scots Law
• to place the Scots law of voluntary obligations within its European context
• to analyse and explain how contracts and promises are formed
• to analyse and explain how voluntary obligations may be vitiated and on what grounds their validity may be challenged
• to analyse and explain the substance of contracts and how the inclusion and exclusion of rights and liabilities is circumscribed by law
• to analyse and explain how contracts break down or otherwise come to an end and the remedies available when they do

Following on from the introduction to the constitution – its key actors, institutions and their functions – in Public Law 1, students taking Public Law 2 will build upon that knowledge here: first by focusing on the ways in which legal (judicial review) and quasi-legal (tribunals, public inquiries, ombudsmen) bodies supervise the exercise of constitutional and administrative decision making; secondly, by a detailed analysis of the political and legal mechanisms which exist for the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms. As such, Public Law 2 is concerned with the abuse of power, and the ways and means by which power can be limited and held to account – whether that is the power of a golf club to suspend an unruly member, the power of a local authority to order the compulsory purchase of privately owned property, or the power of the Prime Minister to wage war.

The purpose of this class is to provide you with a balanced introduction to economics which will be at once self-contained and lay the foundation for further study in economics and more generally. The work of the class will be based on a programme of systematic directed reading, supplemented by tutorials, using group projects and in-class short answer tests as cumulative assessment.

Following on from Public Law 1, Public Law 2 aims to consolidate knowledge and understanding of constitutional and administrative law. Students taking this class will require to have taken Public Law 1 in the first year. It'll build upon knowledge of the key concepts and institutions of the UK constitution. As a second year class, its rationale is to give students the opportunity to progress from an understanding of the constitution to an understanding of the role of the law in the constitutional control of public power. This course encourages students to adopt an evaluative and critical stance towards ongoing constitutional developments. The course will focus on control of administrative action, both by the judiciary and by ombudsmen. The protection of individual rights will be a key feature, focusing on judicial protection but also encompassing the role of human rights institutions in the UK and Scotland. The future control of public power will be discussed, including topical debates concerning constitutional reform in this area.

Family law concerns the control which the law exerts over domestic relationships and families; it affects everyone to a greater or lesser degree.

Topics include:

• the legal status of children, parental responsibilities and rights and the upbringing of children - including issues in adoption and fostering, local authority care and the Children's Hearing system
• legal consequences of marriage/civil partnership
• divorce - including what happens to the family and its financial consequences
• unmarried domestic relations, opposite-sex and same-sex

Commercial law is a second year compulsory subject on the LLB (and LML) degree. The class provides students with an understanding of commercial law in a Scottish context. It partially meets the commercial law subject requirements and related skills outcomes of the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates (albeit that some of the commercial professional topics, eg sale of goods and insurance law, are dealt with by other courses).

Building on the knowledge acquired by students in first year, the general academic objective of the course is to examine the basic principles and rules concerning core aspects of commercial law, including the main principles of agency, partnership and company law, the law relating to various methods of payment (including consumer credit and bills of exchange) the rules governing the ways in which creditors can ‘secure’ repayment of a debt (eg through taking personal guarantees from third parties for repayment of the debt, or by establishing rights in security over debtor property); the basic principles of diligence; the consequences of both corporate and individual debtor inability to repay debts (corporate insolvency and personal bankruptcy respectively).

While the focus of the class is on ‘a black letter’ analysis of relevant statutory and common law in the broad commercial area, in order to aid understanding of relevant principles, the class also examines the policy rationales underlying the current law and recent and projected reforms in this area.

The design of this class is primarily aimed at enhancing students’ ability to read cases, deal with case law and apply the techniques of case-analysis and common law development.

The student will acquire an in-depth and up to date knowledge and understanding, from both a legal and a social perspective, of the rules of law governing involuntary obligations, that is to say the law of delict and the law of unjustified enrichment.

Students will acquire the ability to apply the rules of law to particular fact situations in order to provide definitive answers to the problems exposed in these situations.

Students will develop critical and reasoning skills, giving them the ability to make and present personal and informed judgments on the rules of law and their application within the domestic legal system.

The general rationale of this class is to provide students with a contemporary understanding of the law of property, trusts and succession in Scotland, and to meet Law Society of Scotland requirements in this subject-area.

The EU law class focuses on the constitutional and institutional order of the EU as well as on the internal market. To this end, the class looks at the European integration process, the EU institutions, EU competences, the decision-making process within the EU, the principles underpinning the EU legal order and the principles governing the internal market.

This is the core microeconomics class in second year. It aims to develop your understanding of: the concepts of consumer choice; the motives of the firm and profit maximisation; the market and its role in achieving equilibrium prices and quantities; and the implications of market power. It will introduce you to mathematical techniques commonplace in economics, giving you the ability to apply these in a wider economic context.  

The class builds upon the macroeconomic foundations established in the first year Economics class and both extends and deepens analysis. In particular this class will develop your ability to use key macroeconomic models and will also provide an introduction to the analysis of economic data.

The main focus of the course is on providing an overview of how the handling and proving of facts works in law and how this interacts with the law of evidence. The emphasis is on understanding and application, rather than the learning of the specific details of legal rules.

The course has three general academic aims:

• to introduce students to theoretical and practical issues relating to the use and proof of facts in the Scottish legal system
• introduce students to the central concepts, rules and principles of the Scots law of Evidence
• give students an understanding of the interrelationship between the theory, practice and law relating to the use and proof of facts in the Scottish legal system

This class develops general concerns with the nature and function of law which are key elements in the wide-ranging theoretical, non-subject specific (or meta-law) classes taught within the Law School – Law and Society, Sociology of Law, Legal Theory and Criminology.

The main aim of this class is to introduce students to the major theoretical ideas and values of law, and to debates about those ideas and values, thereby enhancing their understanding of law in general.

The class explores relationships between law and morality, law and society and between law and power. In doing so, the course also explores what we mean by law, morality and power. The course requires students to work on their own and make an oral presentation and trains then in concise thinking.

The aim of the class is to introduce the student to the law of landlord and tenant, and to concepts of housing need and market allocation of housing resources and the different ways in which such concepts are interpreted and operated in modern Britain.  The method of teaching and assessing the class is designed to enhance learning, academic and transferable skills.

This class aims to provide students with an understanding of the problems inherent in situations involving a foreign element and the basic concepts and principles of Scots international private law. More particularly, attention will be given to the rules which establish when the Scottish court has jurisdiction in any case involving a foreign element. The class will also determine the applicable law in cases involving international elements heard before a Scottish court and the rules on recognition and enforcement of judgments in certain contexts.

The International private law rules in relation to:

• contract
• delict
• marriage
• divorce & nullity
• parent & child
• property
• insolvency & succession

Tutorials for this class take place on Saturday mornings.

This class is not recommended for Erasmus exchange students.

Most industrialised countries, and the European Union now have elaborate laws, rules and procedures for ensuring the maintenance of a competitive economy. This course looks at how the competition laws of the United Kingdom and the European Union affect how business operates in Britain.

If you're contemplating a career in business, or are simply a consumer, some knowledge of competition is useful. If you're a student of industrial economics, or of marketing, some knowledge of competition law is a wise precaution. Moreover there are considerably more job opportunities in this area, whether as an economic adviser, legal practitioner or in-house lawyer advising on effective compliance.

Although we are all equal in the law, some are treated more equally than others. This module examines the nature of discrimination and some of the reasons for it, and the history of the law which tries to prohibit it and promote equality. The class looks in depth at the Equality Act 2010 and relevant case law. It covers the protected characteristics, direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, victimisation and disability discrimination, including the duty to make reasonable adjustments. As well as individual anti-discrimination law in employment and goods and services, the class examines preventive and pro-active measures, including positive action and the public equality duty and the arguments around their nature.

Assessment consists of a group presentation on an approved topic of your choice and a piece of coursework requiring problem solving skills and analysis of law and policy.

The Ethics and Justice class aims to introduce students to the world of work by bridging the gap between theory and practice, and by providing them with the intellectual and practical tools to deal with the personal and practical dimensions of law in a competent, ethical and socially responsible manner.

The class will help to develop students’ legal, intellectual and practical skills, and provide them with an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness and ethics of what they do and how this fits in with problems of access to justice. It will also enhance student understanding of the social and economic context in which legal rules operate.

This class is only open to Law Clinic students with case experience.

The extensive uptake of new digital information technologies and particularly, the internet, has resulted in expanding our legal universe, with new laws being created, the application of older laws being challenged and reconfigured and, unavoidably, new legal challenges arising due to conflicts of regulatory decisions with technological advances.

The aim of the class is to address the basic issues arising from the advent of the internet and related digital technologies and familiarise students with important legal developments that have taken place in the last 20 years.

This class encourages students to think constructively and critically about contemporary issues in the field of criminology. It also focuses on contemporary responses to crime in the fields of punishment, imprisonment and penal policy, with reference to developments in Scotland and beyond.

This class deals with the questions, what are those 'basic' or 'fundamental' rights and freedoms to which every individual is entitled in a democratic society, and how to protect them against possible violations.

The class focuses on a selection of the most prominent human rights which have resulted in considerable amounts of litigation.  You'll consider the right to life, right not to be tortured, freedom of expression, children’s rights and issues regarding terrorism.

This class aims to provide students with an understanding of employment law in a UK and EU-wide context and to introduce students to the sources, principles and main features of employment law.

You'll learn about key employment protection provisions and the major collective provisions of employment law in the UK, including the legal position of the contract of employment, the status of employee, the law and practice of unfair dismissal, discrimination law and working time regulations.

The class will focus on practical employment law involving practitioners, an Employment Judge and an Employment Tribunal visit.

This course is concerned with the legal relationship of banker and customer and the services offered by bankers in the community. It examines the financial instruments employed in financing trading and other transactions and is especially concerned with the law and practice of lending, both secured and unsecured.

Intellectual property is integral to all our daily lives, whether it is the music we listen to, the news we read, or chair we sit on, as well as providing the resources necessary to produce new medicines, and the superabundance of brand marketing to which we are routinely subjected.

The class will study the law of patents, trademarks (registered and unregistered), copyright, and moral rights, and the law of confidence (which includes trade secrets). Both the substantive law, and the underlying policy behind providing exclusive rights for this type of property will be examined.

Interested in what is going on in Syria? Concerned about what may or may not be going on in North Korea? Pondering why troops are still in Afghanistan? Then public international law might be the class for you.

The class explores the relationships between states as among themselves and with international institutions. As well as giving an overall view of the area, we'll also look at specific incidents which have arisen and which have been dominated by international law, and which in turn have made huge contributions to the area.

The syllabus looks at sources including treaties and customary law, statehood, the collective use of force, state responsibility and terrorism, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

This class is evening teaching only.

In Scotland, local government employs around 250,000 people. Every council has its own legal department and nearly 10% of practising solicitors in Scotland are employed by local authorities. It is essential that lawyers in private practice have knowledge of how local government works.

The course will cover a selection of the following topics:

• what local government is and what does it does
• the constitutional position of local government
• the structure of Scottish local government and its statutory framework
• elections to and membership of a local authority
• rights, duties, liabilities and restrictions of councillors
• the councillors’ Code of Conduct and registration of interests
• the powers of local government; the ultra vires rule; community planning; the power of wellbeing; publicity powers
• byelaws, management rules and private Acts of Parliament
• how councils work; the political dimension
• external controls on local government; the courts; the ombudsman, the Standards Commission, the Accounts Commission
• a brief guide to local government finance

Adam Smith's hidden hand - markets result in efficient outcomes - doesn't always work. We seek to understand why through the study of market power, externalities and public goods, and then go on to apply these ideas to issues of education, healthcare provision and crime and punishment.

This class builds on the Macroeconomics you studied in second year by covering four topics in detail: (i) models of economic growth; (ii) the effects of macroeconomic policy in an open economy; (iii) the interrelationships between money growth, output, unemployment and inflation; and (iv) the implications of high government debt.

The dissertation is an important part of the fourth year programme. Single Honours Economics BA students are required to submit a dissertation in Economics while Joint Honours BA students may submit a dissertation in Economics or in their other Honours subject.

Game Theory and Information Economics, the topics of this class, consider market failure resulting from two different sources: individuals pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of others; and information asymmetry which alters the way agents behave. Methods to alleviate these market failures will also be considered.

This class aims to provide you with the required tools to understand current macroeconomic issues, such as the interactions between the banking sector and monetary policy or the policy responses to the global financial crisis.  Throughout the class, the analytical usefulness of the theoretical models taught is illustrated with real-world examples.

This class builds upon the empirical content of Macroeconomics 2 and further develops your ability to analyse economic data. In addition, this class lays the foundations for further study of econometrics at Honours level.

This class introduces you to different industry structures and studies the behaviour of firms within those structures.  The material builds on the study of the theory of the firm presented in Microeconomics 2 and provides a foundation for the study of industrial organisation at Honours level.

This course investigates the actions that firms in an industry might take to preserve their profit in that industry, and the implications that this has for competition policy and regulation. We take an analytical approach to the issues which will be supported by examining case studies and current events.

In the third year econometrics class you’ll have learned about regression in both a cross-sectional data and time series data context. This class extends that knowledge in three ways.

First, for cross-sectional data, the class deals with regression techniques where the dependent variable may be restricted or limited in some way. In such cases, the regression model as taught in the third year class is not appropriate; this class develops models which are similar in spirit to the standard regression model, but can handle all of these cases.

A second purpose of Applied Econometrics is to develop regression methods which can be used when you have panel data - consisting of both cross-sectional and time-series dimensions.

Third, the class will build on the introduction to the econometrics of time series data developed in this class by developing two classes of models.

This class gives a balanced view of the role of finance in promoting long-run economic growth, but also booms and busts. The nature and role of financial intermediaries will be introduced, and, afterwards, formally addressed in a simple aggregate growth model. Empirical evidence will be examined, before turning to the specifics of micro-finance. The importance of financial globalisation will also be investigated. Finally, the rest of the class will be devoted to deciphering the causes and consequences of the current financial crisis.

Behavioural Economics offers alternative theories that merge psychological insights with economic theory and are based on experimental and other evidence, that attempt to provide a better explanation of real-world behaviour.

This class is concerned with exploring these new behavioural theories with the aim of providing you with an expanded toolkit with which to approach ‘real-world Economics’ that is based on the burgeoning Behavioural Economics literature that has emerged over the past two or three decades.

After studying this, you should be able to extend much of your previously-learned knowledge in Microeconomics in various directions that take into account more realistic ways of modelling how individuals behave.

The class provides you with an introduction to natural resource, environmental and energy economics and policy. It focuses on the contributions of economics to understanding environmental, energy and resource problems, their causes, and the design of effective public policies to counteract them.