INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL SCIENCE (PREREQUISITE:LEGAL INFORMATICS SEMINAR)

Specific Foundation / Core

The course has manifest introductory and preparatory aims. Fresh entrants in Law School are expected to form sufficient insight into the discipline that they chose to study and acquire the basic tools for navigating through the four years of the studies. It seeks to smoothly and inductively lead the student audience in their early steps in legal science of law, qua a social science. It aims to introduce first-year undergraduate students to the basic concepts of legal science, and to serve as a firm foundation for their legal and cultural apparatus. To this end, the concepts are exposed in a simple and systematic sequence. Continuous use practical examples are also used in order to expose the practical texture of legal issues in light of the regulatory objectives of the legal system in its integrity. The flow of courses is articulated in a consistent way, in order to serve the pedagogical goals of the course. That is, providing an understanding of actual positive law as a whole, an suggesting a comprehensive illustration thereof. Only on such basis understanding as well as interdisciplinary relevance of individual institutions to the specific areas of law may become possible. The great benefit to be derived by students from the 'Introduction to the Science of Law " lies in that, before they start focusing on one or another specific branch of legal science, they will already have developed an early primary stock of knowledge, absolutely necessary for any area legal cognition. Upon completion of the course, students will have acquired a sufficient body of concepts allowing them orientation in legal science. Additionally they will be endowed with perceptions necessary to start performing through written legal instruments or commentaries of judicial decisions. Thus, their further involvement with legal science in depth will have been substantially facilitated.

The course structure is tripartite: a) At an initial stage, a series of presentations aim to show positive law as a binding regulatory instance of society. b) The following courses evolve around the main distinctions of the law between private and public, on the one hand, and domestic and international, on th other. c) At a final stage comes the issue of the interpretation and application of the law, based on methods specific to legal reasoning. Each of these three parts includes a plurality of interconnected thematic modules, which illustrate key features of any legal system. In the course of each presentation specific areas or problems of legal science come under focus, in order to familiarize the student audience with the constant shifting from generality to specificity, and universality to particularity and back a mark feature of legal thought.

Law, Legal Science, Rule, Command, Duty, Right, Custom, Principle, Morals, Ethics, Coercion, Legal Order, Sources of Law, Public Law, Private Law, Domestic Law, International Law, Legal Interpretation, Rationality, Judicial decisions

21-07-2015