Basic Concepts of Law

This is your first real encounter with thinking *like* a lawyer rather than just learning what the law says — you'll wrestle with foundational questions about what makes a rule legally valid, how legal positivism differs from natural law, and where the line between public and private law actually sits. Expect close reading from the course reader each week, structured tutorial discussions, an oral exam, and a final essay that asks you to argue rather than recite. It's the conceptual scaffolding every later law course assumes you have, so the jurisprudence vocabulary you build here is what lets constitutional, contract, and criminal law make sense down the line.