Dr Jo Murkens NAB7.31

This course is available on the Executive LLM. This course is not available as an outside option.

Available to Executive LLM students only. This course will be offered on the Executive LLM during the four year degree period. The Department of Law will not offer all Executive LLM courses every year, although some of the more popular courses may be offered in each year, or more than once each year. Please note that whilst it is the Department of Law's intention to offer all Executive LLM courses, its ability to do so will depend on the availability of the staff member in question. For more information please refer to the Department of Law website.

This course examines the central issues in comparative constitutional law across a range of jurisdictions and from a variety of perspectives. The course opens with an introduction on the purpose of comparative constitutional law. The first substantive part discusses various approaches to the study of CCL as well as the migration of constitutional ideas (and related notions of constitutional borrowing, transplants etc). The second part deals with key constitutional concepts (constitution; rule of law; presidentialism, parliamentarism) which are discussed from a historical and comparative perspective. The point of these sessions is not to compare for the sake of comparing, but to equip you (the researcher) with the conceptual tools to do insightful, critical, and original comparative work of your own. The third part looks challenges the assumptions of liberal constitutionalism by examining constitutions in divided societies and authoritarian constitutionalism. The overall aim of the course is to develop students’ understanding and use of many general theoretical explanations surrounding debates in CCL, and to develop students’ critical/analytical approach to many of the questions facing judges and scholars in the next decade.

24-26 hours of contact time.

Students will have the option of producing a formative exam question of 2000 words to be delivered one month from the end of the module’s teaching session by email.

There is no set book for this course. All materials will be made available in advance on Moodle.

Assessment path 1
Essay (100%, 8000 words).

Assessment path 2
Take home exam (100%).