LLM Programme

Module summary

Legal practice increasingly involves the systematic collaboration of lawyers with experts from different fields of knowledge and professional backgrounds (economists, financial experts, accountants, other forensic experts). This is particularly the case for legal advice provided in the context of complex business transactions. For example, lawyers frequently hire expert economists to evaluate damages in competition law, tort, or IP infringement litigation. Judges often hear economic evidence in competition law and regulatory cases. Mergers and acquisitions often require the collaboration of lawyers, financial experts, economists and accountants. Complex investment projects involve lawyers along with specialists of corporate finance, asset management and valuation analysts. The practice of law thus changes from an autonomous and rather isolated activity to a trans-disciplinary venture. It becomes thus important to understand the way epistemic communities oustide law operate and how their principles/methodologies evolve in order to accommodate legal practice. How ought one to go about mapping, using and evaluating the operations of this external to law expertise? The module combines a theoretical and a practical perspective.

The first part of the module will focus on the meaning of expertise, its language/discourse and the different context, rules and structures within which it operates. Particular emphasis will be given to the emergence of different professions involved in the design of complex business transactions and to the evolution of their professional project, identity and methodologies, as a result of their meeting with the legal system. The module will also examine the way experts are heard in courts/ regulatory proceedings and the rules on the admissibility, submission and assessment of expert evidence in Europe and in the United States.

The second part of the moduel will delve into specific case studies of business transactions where other professionals (than lawyers) are frequently involved. We will look, among others, to cases involving the evaluation of damages, a merger and acquisition operation and a complex investment project. This part of the module will involve speakers from the industry and legal practice (lawyers, judges or forensic experts) who will explain the challenges they face in their day to day work with professionals with a different disciplinary background

Module syllabus

The following topics will be examined in this module

• What is expertise and the role of experts in decision-making
• The rise of the professions: impact on the concept of expertise
• The rhetoric of experts (focus on different disciplinary discourses/identities: economists, accountants, lawyers)
• Reason and argument: how non-legal sources become legal arguments (an ethnographic approach)
• The context, rules and structure of expert evidence assessment : the legal framework in Europe and in the United States
• The politics and practice of judging experts (a case study approach)
• Anatomy of business transactions I: evaluating damages in a trans-disciplinary world
• Anatomy of business transactions II: mergers and acquisitions
• Anatomy of business transactions III: an investment project

Recommended materials

Indicative Bibliography

• A.D. Abbott, The System of the Professions: an Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
• L. Baum, Specializing the Courts (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• *E. Beecher-Monas, Evaluating Scientific Evidence: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Intellectual Due Process (CUP, 2006)
• Y. Dezalay & D. Sugarman, Professional Competition and Professional Power (Routledge, 1995).
• D. Dwyer, The Judicial Assessment of Expert Evidence (Cambridge Univ. Pres, 2008).
• M. Fourcade, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2009).
• M. Fourcade, ‘The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics, (2006) 112(1) American Journal of Sociology, 145-194.
• P.A. Gaughan and R. J. Thornton (eds.), Litigation Economics (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993).
• *J. Goldstein, ‘Foucault among the Sociologists: The Disciplines and the History of the Professions’, (1984) 23 History and Theory, 170-192.
• *S. Jasanoff, Science at the Bar (Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
• *M.S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism – A Sociological Analysis (University of California Press, 1977).
• B. Latour, The Making of Law (Polity, 2010)
• R. Thornton & J. Ward, ‘The Economist in Tort Litigation’, (1999) 13(2) The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 101-112.
• R. Torstendahl & M. Burrage, The Formation of Professions: Knowledge, State and Strategy (Sage, 1990).
  

Preliminary reading

• Max Weber, Science as a Vocation (Tubingen, 1922)
• Max Weber, The Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, 15 The Methodology of the Social Sciences 50-112 (1949)
• Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (published by Palgrave, Macmillan 2008)
  

The application process for the 2013-14 academic session is open.
The deadline for applications to be received has been extended to Monday 1 July 2013

Please refer to the How to apply section for information on the application process.