Law and Resistance (M5115)

15 credits, Level 6

Autumn teaching

Law and Resistance teaches critical legal approaches to law.

What do we mean by resistance? Protest and social movements form a big part of the course content. We understand resistance as ‘doing law differently’ – so, using law to resist, we learn how to resist law itself, and ask what we can expect from law as we try to change our world for the better.

This module will:

  • challenge your ideas of what law is
  • teach you critical legal thinking and practice
  • teach you how to use different critical approaches (like feminism, postcolonialism and posthumanism) to question the extent to which law might be gendered, racist and human-centred – and what we might do about it as students, teachers and practitioners of law
  • give you readings on critical legal scholarship, political theory, international relations theory and a variety of ‘law and’ approaches like law and anthropology.

The course is taught through contemporary case studies that reflect the research interests of your teaching team that year, making for a dynamic and energetic set of weekly topics. Previous topics have included BLM and mass protests, movements for transgender rights and cryogenic technology.

Teaching

100%: Seminar

Assessment

100%: Practical (Portfolio)

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 20 hours of contact time and about 130 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2025/26. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.

Courses

This module is offered on the following courses: