General provisions

Determined on May 7, 2007 by Faculty of Law’s Teaching Committee, Uppsala University, by virtue of Chapter 6 Section 14 and 15 of the Higher Education Ordinance (1993:100). The course plan enters into force on July 1, 2007. Revised on March 6, 2014, the revisions enter into force the spring term 2014.

In General

The course is 15 university points (15 ECTS credits) and an optional course at advanced level in the studies for the degree of Master of Laws, according to the degree requirements adopted 16 April 2007 by the Board of the Faculty of Law of Uppsala University. The course is held in English.

Entry requirements

In general, Swedish students must have attained five passes out of the six courses given at basic level of the LL.M programme. All the obligatory phases of the course in which the student has not attained a pass must have been fulfilled. Swedish students must have passed the exam for Term course 6.

 

Foreign students shall have passed two years of the law degree, and have passed a basic course in constitutional law.

 

If special reasons exist the board of exemption may grant exemption from the acceptance requirements.

 

 

Learning outcomes

Students, after having completed the course should have:

• Detailed knowledge of the constitutional problems, and solutions found, in a number of central legal orders in areas such as norm creation, protection of rights, and constitutional control mechanisms.
• Improved knowledge of the theory and methodology of comparative constitutional law.
• An ability to use constitutional legal material from the states studied, as well as an ability to analyse and evaluate this material in relation to their own legal systems.
• Improved understanding of their own constitutional systems, and how these resemble, and differ from, the states studied.
• A basic understanding of how the states studied have developed and applied constitutional principles, particularly in the light of the processes of internationalisation, privatisation and democratisation.
• An ability to argue and evaluate in an independent way complicated legal issues from a constitutional perspective.
• An ability to comply with essay submission times.

Criteria for grades

For the grade ”approved” (B) the student shall, in addition to showing an ability to present comparative constitutional issues orally and an ability to submit essays on time, achieve all the other learning outcomes, showing an ability to present and summarise material in a descriptive and reflective way.

For the higher grade ”approved with merit” (Ba) the student shall, in addition to fulfiling the requirements for grade B, show an ability to structure material and to reason independently, critically and analytically.

For the highest grade ”approved with distinction” (AB) the student shall, in addition to fulfiling the requirements for grade Ba, show an ability to structure material well, to analyse well, to compare and evaluate critically and to argue convincingly, with a high degree of independence.

Good oral presentations during seminars are taken into account when and if a student’s written work is on the border-line between two grades.

Content

The course consists of constitutional law, concentrating upon issues of institutions and norm creation, protection of rights, and constitutional control mechanisms.

Most of the material comes from European and common law states.

Instruction

The teaching is mainly in the form of seminars and lectures.

All seminar teaching is obligatory. If special reasons exist, the course director may exempt a student from attending particular seminars, and may require appropriate replacement tasks to be performed.

Each student must actively participate in the teaching, by preparing for the seminars and actively taking part in the seminar discussions. Presentation of short written papers may also be required.

The required preparation for the seminars consists of the literature for the course as a whole, and whatever special reading instructions are given for each seminar.

Assessment

The grades given are Fail (U), and the passing grades Pass (B), Pass with credit (Ba) and Pass with distinction (AB).

The exam consists of written essays submitted during the course in accordance with instructions issued by course director. The marks that are given for the essays are added together to give a total result leading to the grade given for the course. If an essay is not handed in at the due time, without medical or other legitimate cause, the essay can only receive, at best, the grade pass. A student who has failed to hand in the essay in due time, may, at the examiner’s discretion, be given the opportunity to submit additional written work which, however, may only receive, at best, the pass grade. A student who has failed the course as a whole will be given one opportunity to submit a retake essay or essays (if both essays were failed) on a topic and at a time determined by the examiner shortly after the end of the course. The retake essay or essays may alternatively be submitted by a student who has failed the course the next time the course is given, at the submission time for the essay(s) in question.

Deception on the part of a student in the examination or in graded course work is prohibited. It is, for example, cheating to submit an essay containing another person’s unattributed work. See, for more details, the written instructions distributed during the course on essay submission. Where deception in this, or another way, is suspected, this will be reported to the University Discipline Board which can decide on an official warning or a period of up to six months suspension of studies.