BLM101 | Legal Methods

This course serves as an introduction to legal studies for incoming undergraduate students. It seeks to provide a foundational understanding of the place of law in our social systems as well as a set of skills that are needed to examine formal legal sources such as the text of legislations, judicial decisions and administrative materials. We will also be conscious of the interdisciplinary character of legal studies and introduce some of the central ideas that will help the students to navigate the early stages of their coursework. We will attempt to do this by going through a representative set of readings that will help the students to think about legal processes and controversies with considerable depth. More significantly, we hope that our students will become comfortable with the notion of arriving at multiple answers to a given problem and evaluating them from different points of view.

This course is sub-divided into three modules. The first module will outline some of the key ideas about what is the place of law in our lives and the various functions that it seeks to perform. While the legal system co-exists with other methods of social control, it is important to identify what makes it necessary for the conduct of human affairs. At the same time, it is important to recognise the limits of legal interventions, and learn how to situate the tasks of rule-making, administration and dispute-settlement in the larger context of the polity, economy and society.

In the second module, we will introduce how legal systems across the world have been categorized around their distinctive characteristics. In particular, we will examine whether the sharp binary that is often drawn between ‘Common Law Systems’ and ‘Civil Law Systems’ holds value for examining the far more complex reality of ‘Hybrid’ legal systems in the present.

The third module engages with the tools needed to examine the formal sources of law. While invoking the conception of ‘separation of powers’, we will work through a chosen set of extracts from legislative enactments, subordinate legislation and judicial opinions. As stated earlier, the main objective is to orient students with some of the essential skills that are needed to read, analyse and discuss legal materials. In doing so, we hope to provide an initiation into ‘Doctrinal Legal Research’.

Module 1               Exploring The Ideas of Law                                               7 Sessions (14 class hours)

TWC                          Academic Reading and Writing Module                         6 Sessions (12 class hours)

Module 2                  Characteristics of Legal Systems                                        7 Sessions (14 class hours)

Module 3                  Working With Legal Sources                                             10 Sessions (20 class hours)