Teaching directory
Course 2024-2025

Ethics and Law [DROIB325]

  • 3 credits
  • 30h
  • 1st quarter
Language of instruction: French / Français

Learning outcomes

The course enables students to develop a critical view of law and the society that produces it.

 

Objectives

The course aims to help students understand the relationship between law and ethics. It seeks to open students up to questions that go beyond the norm itself and that draw their sources from the values that underlie and extend positive law. In this way, it helps to develop a critical view of the law and the society that produces it. As Dumont and Bailleux point out, a purely positivist approach, characterised by the desire to isolate law "from any element external to positive law as enacted by the State" (2010), has its limits. The course therefore aims to show that although "the autonomy of law is real, [...] it is only relative" (ibid.) and proposes a critical and interdisciplinary approach, which "accounts for the coexistence of several distinct and parallel normative orders, including the legal order, and their reciprocal interactions" (Lachapelle, 2021).

Students will thus be able to take a fresh look at the legal discipline, by analysing concrete situations requiring the interpretation and adjustment of rules.

 

Content

As a critical reflection on values, ethics feeds legal production and vice versa: the discussion on the values highlighted by a social phenomenon precedes the normative decision which, in turn, feeds the ethical debate.
 
After an introduction to the dialectic between ethics, morality and law, the course develops a conceptual analysis grid, then brings the ethics-law dialectic to life through a reflection on the human person, from the beginning of life until death. The law of persons, and in particular the rules that concern the most vulnerable people, aims to promote the fundamental values of autonomy, human dignity, protection, equality and consideration for vulnerability that shape our vision of humanity and, as such, deserve to be explored in greater depth and questioned, particularly in the light of their evolution.
 
The general theme of the law of persons will be broken down into four sub-themes, focusing on the unfolding of human existence and legal personality: the beginning of life, procreation, the course of life and the end of life. Attention will also be paid to people in particularly vulnerable situations (children, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, etc.), on the one hand, and to entities that straddle a boundary between subjects and objects that the law struggles to grasp (the embryo, animals, nature and robots), on the other. Finally, the red thread running through the law faculty will be integrated into the course.
 
Each of these themes offers numerous concrete illustrations of conflicts of values, which cannot be resolved solely by the rule of law. By highlighting both the richness and the limits of legal construction, ethical reflection enables a critical vision of the law. The course is therefore conceived as a law course in which the values underlying the production of legal norms are discussed.

Teaching methods

The course considers law as a practice. Students will be invited to familiarize themselves with positive law, so that they can then confront it with concrete situations requiring the interpretation and adjustment of rules. Explanations and discussions will help to do justice to the rich complexity of legal practice, which exists only in the many attempts to respond to each situation. The course thus presents the law as a living tool, in perpetual flux and whose relevant use implies continuous and interdisciplinary reflection.

Moreover, legal practice is often affected, or even transformed, by other practices and other ways of thinking, such as scientific, philosophical, psychological, sociological and medical thought. Consequently, to gain a better understanding of what is at stake in legal practice, it is sometimes necessary to look at it from the outside, through the feedback of practitioners from other disciplines who are called upon to interpret and apply the rules that govern their practice.

Concretely, the following methods will be used: interactive and participative teaching, exchanges based on prior readings of texts or occasional video screenings, occasional invitations from a lecturer on a particular theme, etc.

Evaluations

The examination will be written and open, in order to assess students' ability to present a personal and critical point of view based on the skills they have acquired.

Recommended readings

Written materials (available to students on Webcampus):

  • A general course outline
  • A collection of texts
  • Detailed PowerPoint slides

 

 

 

Language of instruction

French / Français

Location for course

NAMUR

Organizer

Faculté de droit
Rue de Bruxelles, 61
5000 NAMUR

Degree of Reference

Undergraduate Degree