Law & Politics: Contemporary Global Challenges

The objective of this course is to contribute to the students’ development of a comprehensive and critical framework to understand and analyze contemporary challenges of societies around the globe. The course will mainly address a series of pressing issues regarding law and politics. The first section of the course will explore the origins, purpose and main features of liberal democracies. This section will help students understand how political power is created, distributed, limited and sustained over time in liberal democracies. The second section of the course will inquire on specific social and political institutions within liberal democracies. The analysis of the rationale behind such institutions will be conducted through a philosophical, theoretical and empirical approach. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with a set of fundamental law and politics ideas and, moreover, will be able to apply this new knowledge to understand political and social problems in their own countries and regions.