The first-year Political Institutions course has the twofold objective of introducing students to a set of objects and familiarizing them with a set of methods.
The themes selected for the semester are organized to: first, clarify a number of core concepts for the analysis of constitutional law and political institutions; second, to examine several examples of foreign political institutions in order; third, to allow students to gain a thorough understanding of the background, situation and characteristics of present-day French institutions. Using case studies and applied examples, each session gives students the opportunity to enrich their methodological apparatus. By rejecting any idea of orthodoxy in the analysis of political and constitutional institutions, students must gradually learn to select their intellectual tools pragmatically to suit their argument and to develop imaginative analyses.
The final exam accounts for 1/3 of the final grade.
A continuous assessment accounts for the remaining 2/3. The continuous assessment is computed as follows: 1/3 of the grade for the midterm exam (mid-semester exam common to all students) and the remaining 2/3 will be decided by the teaching assistant of the tutorial using 3 different evaluations
Aalt Willem Heringa, Constitutions Compared: An Introduction to Comparative Constitutional Law (Fourth Edition), 2016