law

ALESSANDRA DI MARTINO

Knowledge and understanding:
The course aims to provide students with advanced knowledge of fundamental rights
protection, covering both theoretical and practical aspects through constitutional
comparison


Applied knowledge and understanding:
The expected outcome at the end of the course is that students will be able to
understand the specificities of the protection of fundamental rights in the main
contemporary legal systems.

Independent judgment:
By the end of the course, students are expected to have developed an adequate
ability to understand general problems related to fundamental right and the critical ability to
compare different rights’ protection models and contrast different constitutional cultures

Communication skills:
Upon completion of the course, students should be able to critically present issues
relating to the protection of fundamental rights from a general theoretical perspective and
from a critical-comparative perspective.

Learning skills:
By the end of the course, students should be able to demonstrate a broader
understanding of fundamental rights’ protection than at the beginning, considering
theoretical, practical and especially comparative issues.

Exam of Institutions of Public Law; knowledge of foreign languages may help

The course is designed to provide an in-depth study, from a comparative perspective, of the main theoretical issues and practical controversies concerning the protection of fundamental rights.
The first part of the course will examine the general reconstructions that, from a critical approach, have involved fundamental rights in recent years: the history and genealogy of fundamental rights and the structure of rights. The critique of depoliticisation and the relationship between the legal protection of rights and the democratic and representative public sphere will also be addressed. In this context, the more classical themes of generations and dimensions of fundamental rights will be analysed. The question of the universality of rights will also be problematised, with particular regard to the relationship between the Western legal tradition and non-Western legal traditions.
The second part of the course will analyze some controversial issues, through theoretical and case-based approaches: freedom of thought and democracy in digital platforms; anti-discrimination and the principle of equality; labour and social rights; climate and intergenerational justice; abortion; dignity and self-determination; multiculturalism and religious symbols; and the rights of indigenous peoples. The cases examined will be drawn mainly from the jurisdictions of European countries and the United States, but will also look, where relevant, at judgments or constitutional texts from countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

For attending students, the materials to be studied will be made available on the e-learning platform, selected according to the individual topics discussed in class.
Non-attending students should study, for the first part of the course, A. Honneth, Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundation of Democratic Life (2011), New York 2014. For the second part, relating to a choice of case studies, the programme must be agreed with the professor

In presence

Final oral examination; intermediate written pre-examination for students who attend the course. The aim of the exam is to assess students' study and reasoning skills and to compare different constitutional cultures. The intermediate examination accounts for 50 to 75% of the final examination assessment. Possibility of giving a PowerPoint presentation during the course.