Prof Kai Moller CKK.7.01

This course is available on the Executive Master of Laws (ELLM). 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 a range of controversial issues in human and constitutional rights law from a comparative perspective. These include: Negative and Positive Obligations, and Social Rights; Abortion; 'Deviant' Sex: Sodomy, Sado-Masochistic Sex, and Incest; Same-Sex Marriage; Religion in the Public Sphere; Hate Speech and Denial of the Holocaust; Obscenity. We will approach them by comparing and contrasting judgments from courts all over the world, with an 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 extremely 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. 

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.

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.

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

Assessment path 2
Take-home assessment (100%).