Faculty and Course Offerings

Faculty for 2026

 

• Prof. Liz Keyes, University of Baltimore School of Law
• Prof. Peter Danchin, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
• University of Aberdeen Faculty TBD

Course Offerings

 

Comparative Migration Law & Policy

3 credits, taught by Prof. Elizabeth Keyes (University of Baltimore School of Law) and Prof. Solomon Obulor (University of Aberdeen)

Description: This course will explore the migration policies of the United States and the United Kingdom. Topics will include existing pathways for legal migration; refugee and asylum law and policy; the role of human rights jurisprudence in migration law; the role of borders (focused on the U.S. Southern Border and the complications created by Northern Ireland's border with the EU in Ireland); and prospects for reform.

 

The Right to Religious Freedom in International and Comparative Perspective 

3 credits, taught by Prof. Peter Danchin (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law) and Prof. Matyas Bodig (University of Aberdeen)

Despite formal guarantees entrenched in modern international conventions and national constitutions, religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities have emerged as contentious and charged issues in human rights law, politics and praxis. The right to religious freedom has become a key site of legal and political struggles to negotiate individual and communal relations across lines of religious difference. This course provides a critical introduction to questions of freedom, religion, community and the individual as they are today being contested in normative and legal discourses on the right to religious freedom.  After considering the basic nature, scope and history of the right to religious liberty in the UN and European human rights regimes, the course will focus on:

1. the case law of the European Court of Human Rights since 2000 involving claims by religious individuals and communities (both majorities and minorities) — key among them claims to religious freedom by European Muslims — and the ways in which this jurisprudence is being challenged and unsettled by a variety of actors both inside and outside the Court;
2. the legal and political salience of minority/majority frameworks and the protection accorded to religious minorities in a democracy;
3. the relationship between secularism, religion and the state and different models of religion-state relations; and
4. what religion is imagined to be in struggles over religious liberty.