Professor Kai Möller

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is not available as an outside option.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

This course examines a range of controversial issues in human and constitutional rights law from a comparative perspective. These issues include: abortion; euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide; same sex marriage; religion in the public sphere; hate speech and denial of the holocaust; obscenity; affirmative action. We will approach them by comparing and contrasting judgments from courts all over the world, with a certain emphasis on cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the U.K. Supreme Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. The goals of the course are, first, to introduce the students to the jurisprudence of those powerful and influential courts, and, second, to invite them to think about and critically analyse some of the most controversial, difficult, and important rights issues of our time.

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in the Lent Term and two hours in the Summer Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Lent Term.

One 2,000 word essay.

The course is mainly case-based; however, interested students may find the following book helpful: V Jackson and M Tushnet, Comparative Constitutional Law, 3rd edition, 2014.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the summer exam period.