Socio-legal Studies Module: the Bristol Experience

In this chapter we discuss the stand-alone ‘Socio-legal studies’ module that has been offered to undergraduate students at Bristol University since 2006. The module seeks to provide students with an encounter with law ‘from the outside’ through a social science lens. The chapter discusses first, the intellectual rationale behind the module; then we move on to the structure and content of the course. We then discuss the forms of assessment, providing some examples and discussing the students’ response to assessment. Finally, we look at the sort of students that have been attracted to the module and discuss their feedback to the content.