Our doctoral program allows students to deepen their knowledge of their chosen discipline, become familiar with research paradigms in their field, formulate research questions that integrate with major national and international legal issues, develop their critical thinking, and write and present their research results under the supervision of a disciplinary specialist. This program targets managers and senior managers, as well as legal consultants wishing to tackle the challenges posed by the global and contested context of contemporary legal issues.
The PhD includes six trimesters of study. The first year comprises taught courses and in-class evaluations, including core courses for all PhD students and specialized courses focusing on the legal field. The core courses cover the following areas: introduction to quantitative and qualitative research methods, legal and ethical framework of research, theories of organization and organizational models, and planning a research project. Specialized teaching units include legal research methods, international commercial law, current legal thinking methods, and international arbitration.
Course assessments consist of 50% continuous assessment and 50% end-of-semester assessment (exam, open-book exam, or in-class assignment). The final project is entirely based on continuous assessment. Teaching methods are participatory and interactive, with numerous references to real-time work experiences, including participation in real case studies and analyses.
The final two years focus on the development and writing of the PhD thesis (50,000 words), which is equivalent to 120 ECTS. Thesis supervision includes research seminars covering the following areas: thesis writing, statistics used in research projects, research involving human subjects, research integrity, seminar presentations, and thesis defense training. These years also include group and individual tutorials (over three trimesters) and guided individual readings (over four trimesters). Thesis writing is conducted in parallel with these teaching units over the four trimesters of the final two years. The thesis defense is scheduled at least two months after the thesis submission.