Aims

Based on the observation that a legal expert's practice leads him/her to regularly manage a large range of human conflicts, the present course, inspired from the reform on "one's formation management", should respond to a triple aim:

- Initiate students to differential readings of human conflicts and to the understanding of both socio-economic and psychological mechanisms that can explain the occurrence and the development of human conflicts
- Analyse the existing processes that have been set up to solve or, at minimum, to manage human conflicts. A special emphasis will be put on justice, legal procedures and law, on the one hand, and on different forms of mediation and the specificities of such kinds of conflict resolution methods, on the other hand.
- Allow each student, within the class, to personally experience (at least virtually) the confrontation to human conflicts in order to express and analyse his/her own reactions, attitudes, emotions, and projections and to develop his/her capacity to locate oneself in relation to the conflict.

Main themes

Although each teacher should be able to freely assess the most suitable means to reach the course's objectives, the course's content will inevitably proceed from its objectives. A first part will focus on the study of human conflictsA second part will focus on the study of a series of conflict management methods emphasising the specificity of each process, for instance: legal rules, conciliation, negotiation, mediation. A third part - a part that could parallel the first two parts - will focus on each student's learning of his/her own aptitudes to locate him/herself in relation to the conflict and to assume its resolution or its management.

Content and teaching methods

Method

a. Because of the interdisciplinary aspects of the objectives and the content of the class, the course should be ideally taught simultaneously by a law professor and a professor in social sciences or clinical psychology.

b. Interactive methods will be used. Lectures will be used for the teaching of the first two parts of the course. This teaching, however, will be conceived in such a way for students to react and personally involve themselves in the analysis of the studied mechanisms. In order to favour interaction, the teaching will be based on a series of readings. In addition, group seminars will be used in which students will face situations with human conflicts to be managed. Students will be encouraged to analyse their own attitudes towards the conflict. Some of these seminars could be given by external experts specialised in the domain of human conflict management. In order to finance these interventions, a call should be made to the didactic development found of the U.C.L.

c. The evaluation of the knowledge and the acquired competence of the students will take into account the personal work accomplished by each student.