CREDITS 2 (LV) 3 (ECTS) - 32 Contact Hours
The module introduces core issues of legal philosophy and critical approaches to legal practice and legal thought. The programme of learning provides students with core skills of critical analysis and with the opportunity to reflect critically at an advanced level on core legal material, including topics covered in other first year law modules and in later stages of the degree (e.g. the reading of criminal cases in order to identify the philosophico-political matters in them). The module starts with a reflection on two central questions that shape our thinking about law: 1) “what is law?” and 2) “how we think about law?”. Further subjects examine the relationship between law and morality, law and politics and how legal philosophy shapes legal practice. In addition, it examines how socio-political and historical events (such as the Nuremberg Trials) and legal practice, more generally, shaped, significantly, modern legal philosophy (theory).
To that extent, students will be in a position to observe that theory of the law and its practice are closely interconnected, being part of a dynamic relationship. with the one shaping and informing the other and vice versa.
Thus, Legal Philosophy module encourages students to think critically about the institution of law and its operation in our everyday lives. It encourages them to question law’s commands and ask; why it is as it is and in whose interests it operates.- Teacher: Adam Waldemar Czarnota