BMET 23A26 - Legal Reasoning Through Asylum and Immigration Litigation (tbc)

This workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to the principles and tools of legal methodology. Participants will explore how legal reasoning works in practice, how to interpret legal texts and how to construct well-supported legal arguments. Alongside theoretical instruction, the workshop will make extensive use of jurisprudential examples, with a particular focus on case law in asylum and international immigration matters. These cases have been selected to illustrate key methodological challenges, including the interpretation of international protection norms, the assessment of factual elements and the interaction between domestic and international legal frameworks.

The core of the course will be legal reasoning. The workshop will begin by introducing the basic legal vocabulary used to describe the concepts that will be covered by the workshop, namely “law”, “legal system”, “legal argument”, “rule of law”, “sources of law”, “jurisprudence”. We will then focus on the difference between the interpretation and the application of law; with this respect, the students will be introduced to the different methods that exist to interpret the law. These methodological tools are then applied to a curated set of asylum and immigration cases, allowing students to practice identifying issues, applying norms and evaluating competing interpretations. Building on this practical case work, the final stage of the workshop focuses on legal advocacy: students will be introduced to how to present legal arguments both orally and in writing, drawing on the same case studies they have already analyzed in the previous session(s). This sequencing ensures that analytical, methodological and advocacy skills reinforce each other while keeping each component manageable at the Bachelor level.