50193 - CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRATION LAW
Course taught in English
Go to class group/s: 31
It is recommended that students have already taken exams in constitutional and European law.
Mass migration has reached extraordinary dimension due to both structural factors and contingencies of historical and political nature. The law needs to address such a phenomenon with a view to guarantee the rights of those who leave their own countries in search of life chances elsewhere. At the same time, law needs to deal with the consequences of mass migration on the endurance of national political communities. Against this backdrop, the course firstly addresses the theoretical aspects related to the entry of non-citizens in national polities, with implications in terms of multiculturalism and xenophobic tensions. Secondly, the course addresses the law on citizenship and migration in practice, from the dual perspective of domestic law and European and international law.
Starting with the concepts of “citizenship” and “non-citizenship”, the course then focuses on the comparative citizenship and migration law. Finally, it covers the EU Asylum System. The main topics of the course are:
- Citizenship and cosmopolitan theories.
- The rules on citizenship and the status of non-citizens in a comparative perspective.
- The general rules on entry and admissions.
- The right to asylum, political refuge, and subsidiary protection.
- The rights of unauthorized immigrants.
- The EU citizenship.
- The EU Common Asylum System.
- The interplay between the EU, the ECHR and national systems as far as the protection of foreigners is concerned.
- Identify and discuss the theoretical foundation of the rights of foreigners.
- Distinguish migration law from the general theory of human rights, in order to frame migration issues within the complexity of ethical, cultural and legal aspects raised by the mass migration phenomenon.
- Contextualize rules concerning migration within the framework of a multilevel legal order.
- Understand the foundations of the EU citizenship and free movement of persons.
- Understand the functioning of the EU Common Asylum System
- Use (national and European) legal materials with a view to identify the legal status of non-citizens.
- Solve conflicts of laws concerning the legal status of non-citizens.
- Identify the instruments for the protection of non-citizens’ rights in a multilevel legal order.
- Assess the most appropriate strategies, in their respective fields of activity, to address the complexity of the issues raised by non-citizens status.
- Face-to-face lectures
- Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
- Case studies /Incidents (traditional, online)
- Group assignments
- Interactive class activities (role playing, business game, simulation, online forum, instant polls)
The learning experience of this course includes, in addition to face-to-face lectures:
- The discussion case studies, which are progressively developed with a view to follow the development of the topics.
- Group assignments, which are proposed to students with a view to stimulate their ability to build legal arguments.
- Moreover, students are encouraged to engage in class discussion, to bring their personal understanding of the topics and to share their insights on legal arguments.
- The course also includes guest lectures by practitioners, aimed at providing students with an understanding of how norms concerning migrants are concretely applied.
|Continuous assessment||Partial exams||General exam|
With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above mentioned learning outcomes, students’ assessment is based on three components:
- Final one-hour written exam consisting in answering one open question to be chosen among two (75% of the final grade).
- Group assignment and presentation in class (20% of the final grade).
- Active in class participation (5% of the final grade).
Students sit a written exam, which consist in one open question and 10 multiple-choice questions to be completed in one hour.
- C. Gans, Citizenship and Nationhood, in Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, Oxford UP, last ed., pp. 108-129
- R. Rubio-Marin, Integration in Immigrant Europe: Human Rights at a Crossroad, in Human Rights and Immigration, Oxford UP, 2014, 72-105
- Foundations of International Migration Law, Cambridge University Press, last ed., selected chapters as specified in the syllabus.
- Case-studies discussed in class and uploaded on the Bboard platform.