Rationale
This course equips students with a comprehensive understanding of the role of law in securing and protecting the rights and well-being of children and young people within a wider social, political and economic context. It is concerned with the ways in which the law constructs childhood, grants or denies them agency, offers them protection and security while negotiating wider, often shifting, understandings of childhood. Students will therefore be able to critically analyse competing theoretical approaches to child law, appraise and apply the jurisprudence of childhood in domestic, European and international law. In its treatment of substantive law, this module will not only concern itself with appreciations and application of legal principles, it also give due regard to the interrogation of these principles from within and without law. As this area of law is multifaceted, beyond core elements, the module is necessarily selective. For relevance to the wider streams in this degree programme, there is some deliberateness in the choice of education, criminal law and feature of regulation transition to the labour market.