Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this course deals with a wide set of contact points between law and society. These include first a retrospective look at the significance of various factors or causal elements fuelling the changes underlying the development of societies, such as the invention of new technologies amidst an evolving relationship between politics and economics. It then asks how these numerous changes will influence the processes underlying legal thinking and reasoning as well as the adoption, application, and enforcement of laws in the future. To this end, the discussion will also present new theoretical approaches in law, such as the 'law and economics' movement or a political economic, as well as novel concepts, such as 'global governance' or 'global administrative law', to try to identify new trends in the field of legal science.

CILO-1: Students will be able to explain the interplay between law and society, based on the thought and work of the law & society movement. CILO-2: Students will be able to describe the challenges posed by technology to the law, with particular focus on information technologies. CILO-3: Students will be able to comment on the findings and conclusions of interdisciplinary and empirical studies illustrating the interplay between law, society and technology. CILO-4: Students will be able to discuss several law and technology related topics, and the response given by lawmakers, courts and legal scholars, and undertake a critical piece of writing on one or more of the topics covered in the course.