The Common Law in Commercial Litigation

High-value, high-profile and high drama corporate and commercial disputes often dominate the news cycle and seize the public imagine. Think of the fallout among the founders of Facebook, Apple's recent 'battery-gate' scandal, and so on. Many such disputes involve, in whole or part, civil litigation among private parties, which is an incredibly complex and challenging area of legal practice. In the common law world, civil litigation practice requires mastery of legal doctrine spanning the law of contract, torts, equity and trusts, unjust enrichment, agency, and remedies, not to mention specialist knowledge of banking law, shipping law, corporate law as well as the relevant regulatory domains. The purpose of this course is to provide participants from non-common law backgrounds an accessible introduction to the core areas of common law that commercial litigators and practitioners apply in tackling such disputes. Pedagogically, we use a 'real-world' case study method as the platform for grounding the discussions in our lectures and tutorials, based on popular models such as the Harvard Business School case method, the hypothetical problem-method used in leading law schools, as well as popular texts which present legal material through case studies, such as Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter (CUP 2016) and Company Law in Context (2012). Our approach is intended to take participants quickly up the learning curve, by helping participants to get a feel of the main common law doctrines and how these are keyed to commercial practice. As with experiences in tackling moot problems, we believe that students learn best not by going through the texts of each body of doctrinal law, but by learning to hone in on relevant and overlapping areas as part of a legal strategy.