Undergraduate Qatar Law 2026-2027

The course provides firstly a map of private law as drawn from the Roman-law-derived institutional scheme. It then progresses to an equivalent of the medical student’s study of anatomy in the sense that, concentrating on the law of property and obligations, it examines the main concepts of private law in the Roman-law-derived civilian tradition and how they operate together as a system to solve every day legal problems.

This course presents legal history over several millennia and from many different original cultures. This course carries the student through a legal adventure, exploring a wide range of legal systems around the globe and throughout human history.

The course covers the origins of law from Africa, South Asia, East Asia and beyond. From those beginnings, it traces how legal cultures emerged, evolved, or transformed. The course will explore the interplay of law and religion over the centuries. The goal of the course is to enable students to become aware of the wonderful diversity of legal systems before the Era of Exploration.

The Foundations of Public Law course provides students with an overview of the fundamental principles and institutions shared by constitutional democracies. It will cover four broad topics: (1) conceptual building blocks; (2) the main institutions of the government; (3) the state and its citizens; and (4) the state in the context of international relations. The course lays down the foundation for both jurisdiction-specific courses and courses on comparative constitutional law.

Legal culture can be described as ‘ideas and expectations of law made operational by institutional practices’ (Sunde). Differing ideas and expectations about how law should be made operational lead to significant differences across legal systems globally, e.g. in terms of legal methodologies. Using a tried and tested analytical model, students become critically aware of these differences, enabling them to appreciate the rich cultural ‘grammar’ underlying laws as practised around the world.

The common law tradition is one of the major legal traditions of the world. This course briefly introduces students to the conceptual and institutional structures of the common law tradition. This in turn introduces the fundamentals of the modern English legal system and its practical operation. A large section of the course then turns to the practical operation of English law through study of English Criminal Law.

This course introduces students to the challenges of reading legal sources. It introduces them to reading different ways in which legal norms may be produced or developed in different legal cultures (e.g. through legislative activity, judicial decisions and juristic writings and international treaties). It assesses students by requiring them to read and then analyse a range of primary legal sources in a manner sympathetic to their legal cultures.

The energy industry is a particularly important sector of the economy. Fossil fuel sources provide a state with a source of financial revenue and potential to secure energy supplies. This comes at a cost: health and safety risk or environmental degradation.  A regulatory and commercial framework has to be provided to facilitate and control these developments. Alternatives to fossil fuels exist, such as hydropower, wind, solar and nuclear. These are preferable from a climate change perspective but these, too, present legal and regulatory challenges, as does the process of providing a secure and affordable energy supply to end-point consumers.