85502 - Global Justice

Academic Year 2021/2022

  • Docente: Silvia Bagni
  • Credits: 6
  • SSD: IUS/20
  • Language: English
  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Ravenna
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in International Cooperation on Human Rights and Intercultural Heritage (cod. 9237)

Learning outcomes

The course aims at introducing to the global justice debate, a multifaceted subject lying at the crossroads between philosophy of law, metaethics, and the study of international institutions while focusing on possible justifications, as well as on the shortcomings, of present legal arrangements at the transnational, international and global levels.

Course contents

This course introduces students to the study of “global justice”, and immerses them in specific case studies of national and supra-national legal systems, with the aim of defining the common core of the expression. The course will begin by introducing students to the basics of comparative legal methodology, as the more fitting instrument to approach the subject-matter. Then, it will be discussed the meaning of the two main concepts of the course, “global” and “justice”. The bulk of the course focuses on distinct social, economic and cultural issues, that can be considered as main topics for global justice: environment and development; interculturalism; transitional justice; right of self-determination of peoples; legal pluralism.

Lesson 1 What's the law from a comparative perspective?

Discussion on legal monism and legal pluralism

Suggested reading: B.Z. Tamanaha, Law, in Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, 2008 , St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-0095, p. 1-19

Lesson 2 Comparative Method

Comparative methodology as an instrument to study global justice.

Suggested readings:

George P. Fletcher, Comparative Law as a Subversive Discipline, 1998, 46 Am. J. Comp. L. 683, pp. 1-14

Jakko Husa, Methodology Of Comparative Law Today: From Paradoxes To Flexibility?, in RIDC, n. 4/2006, pp. 1095-1117

Rodolfo Sacco, Legal Formants: A Dynamic Approach to Comparative Law (Installment I of II), in The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Winter, 1991), pp. 1-34

Lesson 3 Global Justice

What’s “globalization”? Discussion with the students, on the base of the suggested readings, on the meaning of the expressions used in the module’s title. Which type of “justice”? Approaching the concept from a positivistic and comparative legal perspective (teacher’s slides)

Suggested readings:

James Tully, Jeffrey L. Dunoff, Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Mattias Kumm and Antje Wiener, Introducing global integral constitutionalism, in Global Constitutionalism, 5, 2016, pp 1-15, doi:10.1017/S2045381715000210

S. Bagni, M. Nicolini, Comparative Constitucional Justice, Eleven, The Hague, 2021 (selected chapters)

Lesson 4

Environmental justice: lawsuit simulation by the students on a case previously assigned by the Professor.

Lesson 5-6 Ecological Constitutionalism

Discussion with the students, on the base of the suggested readings and the extracts of courts’ rulings, about earth jurisprudence, rights of Nature and ecological constitutionalism

Suggested readings:

Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? –Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, in Southern California Law Review 45 (1972): 450-501.

Carducci M., Bagni S., Montini M., Mumta I., Lorubbio V., Barreca A., Di Francesco Maesa C., Musarò E., Spinks L., Powlesland P.(2020) Towards an EU Charter of the Fundamental Rights of Nature. Study, Brussels: European Economic and Social Committee (https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/our-work/publications-other-work/publications/towards-eu-charter-fundamental-rights-nature).

Lesson 7

Outdoor lesson: Meetings with some Public Servants of Ravenna Municipality and with some members of local NGOs

Lesson 8

Intercultural justice: lawsuit simulation by the students, on a case previously assigned by the Professor.

Lesson 9

Multi-, pluri-, inter-culturalism

Suggested readings:

S. Bagni (coord.), Lo Stato interculturale: una nuova eutopia? – The Intercultural State: a New Eutopia? – El Estado intercultural: ¿una nueva eutopía?, Bologna: Dipartimento di Scienze giuridiche, 2017, ISBN 9788898010455, https://amsacta.unibo.it. DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/5488 (only the articles in English).

S. Bonfiglio, Intercultural constitutionalism: from human rights colonialism to a new constitutional theory of fundamental rights, London: Routledge, 2019

Lesson 10

The right of self-determination of peoples.

Conference with a representative of the Sahara Arab Democratic Republic

Readings/Bibliography

Compulsory bibliography for the final exam.

All the bibliography (except for book n. 9) is open access. Useful additional materials (ppt of lessons, sources of law and case-law) will be uploaded on the course’s moodle.

1) B.Z. Tamanaha, Law, in Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, 2008 , St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-0095, p. 1-19

2) George P. Fletcher,Comparative Law as a Subversive Discipline, in The American Journal of Comparative Law, Fall, 1998, 46 Am. J. Comp. L. 683, pp. 1-14

3) Jakko Husa, Methodology Of Comparative Law Today: From Paradoxes To Flexibility?, in RIDC, n. 4/2006, pp. 1095-1117

4) Rodolfo Sacco, Legal Formants: A Dynamic Approach to Comparative Law (Installment I of II), in The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Winter, 1991), pp. 1-34

5) James Tully, Jeffrey L. Dunoff, Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Mattias Kumm and Antje Wiener, Introducing global integral constitutionalism, in Global Constitutionalism, 5, 2016, pp 1-15, doi:10.1017/S2045381715000210

6) S. Bagni, M. Nicolini, Comparative Constitutional Justice, Eleven, The Hague, 2021 (selected chapters)

7) Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?–Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, in Southern California Law Review 45 (1972): 450-501.

8) S. Bagni (coord.), Lo Stato interculturale: una nuova eutopia? – The Intercultural State: a New Eutopia? – El Estado intercultural: ¿una nueva eutopía?, Bologna: Dipartimento di Scienze giuridiche, 2017, ISBN 9788898010455, https://amsacta.unibo.it. DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/5488 (only the 2 chapters in English)

9) S. Bonfiglio, Intercultural constitutionalism: from human rights colonialism to a new constitutional theory of fundamental rights, London: Routledge, 2019

Teaching methods

The course will be a mix of lectures, discussions in class and teamwork by the students. The inspiring principle of the module is Albert Einstein sentence: “Education is not learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”. So, students’ participation and commitment in the tasks assigned to them during the module will be a fundamental ingredient for the achievement of the collective result.
Many lessons will be held in the form of a lawsuit simulation: the teacher will give students the factual highlights of one or more cases and will assigned to groups of them the role of justices, prosecutors or barristers. They will have to prepare the case at home (through the study of the constitution of the country involved and of the relevant international law suggested by the teacher) and then simulate the trial in class. The following lesson will be dedicated to the discussion of the main legal points emerged from the simulation, on the base of academic readings suggested by the teacher on each topic and of the reading of the real rulings of the court (in full text or extracts).

Assessment methods

Attending students

Coursework: 70%. The teacher will assign a score of maximum 20 points to the presentation of the case realized by each group during the lessons. The evaluation criteria will be: skills levels on problem solving, originality of the solutions found, critical sense demonstrated during the defense of the case, suitable means of expression, willingness to work in team and respect towards the others.

Each member of the team will be assigned the same score, notwithstanding the part he has played in class.

Final written exam: 30%. A week before the exam date, students will have to send a short essay (10 pages as maximum, except bibliography, Times New Roman 12, single space) on one of the cases presented in class, different from the one they presented. They will have to explain the Problem, and how they would have solved the case. They will have to demonstrate: 1) to have acquired a sufficient knowledge of the course contents, by applying correctly the concepts learnt in class and from the syllabus readings; 2) to be able to quote coherently authors’ doctrines; 3) to have acquired an adequate legal language; 4) to be able to combine legal or philosophical doctrines and norms or to defend a critical position against a theory discussed in class; 5) to have listened to the teacher’s and classmates’ comments and to be able to answer properly. The essay will be given a score from 0 to 10.

The final score will result from the sum of the two written proofs. The teacher may give extra-points (in particular the “cum laudem”) for the proactive participation in class.

Students who do not accept the vote proposed by the teacher on the 2 written Proofs can do the oral exam on the whole course programme.


Non-attending students
Non-attending students will be assessed on the ground of course's bibliography and additional materials available on the teacher’s moodle. Firstly, they will have to pass a multiple choice test, consisting of 30 items on the suggested bibliography. Then, only if they get the sufficiency in the multiple choice test (18/30), they will be admitted to the oral exam, that will be held in the same day, immediately after the correction of the test. The score assigned will be on the base of 30/30. The final score will result from the arithmetic average of the two proofs.


Teaching tools

Moodle of the course in IOL

Office hours

See the website of Silvia Bagni

SDGs

Reduced inequalities Climate Action Peace, justice and strong institutions

This teaching activity contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda.