Basic reading skills to understand legal documents

This course is aimed at providing the tools necessary to understand legal documents from original English sources.

It will provide students with reading techniques to improve comprehension and to draw flowcharts, timelines or maps to make a synthesis of the piece being read.

It will analyze the structures that are commonly used in legal texts and also the archaic words and phrases that are only used to embellish the legal prose but cause confusion and blurr the meaning and intention of a text.

It will address a theoretical background necessary to understand the basic concepts outlined within he American and British legislations. It shall also provide the terminology currently used in documents and bibliography with which the student may be faced if investigating those subjects within a Common Law environment. 

Through the revision of basic concepts, the students are going to be encouraged to make a comparison - whenever possible - with the Argentine law system as a basis to confirm correct understanding of the concept written in the second language.

 It will provide a wide range of specific vocabulary which the student may find useful to work with. This course is aimed at students who are deeply interested in contracts, commercial and corporate as well as financial and banking subjects.

Likewise, the course is aimed at providing a frame necessary to understand legal thinking within the Common Law system and the conceptual differences of the same as compared to Civil Law Countries.

PROF. T.P. Rita Tineo