The Faculty of Law grows: a building of 16,024 m2 is under way

Foundation stone laying ceremony.
Foundation stone laying ceremony.
Institutional
(27/10/2015)

The foundation stone laying ceremony of the building that will host new facilities for the Faculty of Law took place on Tuesday 27 October. New facilities will be located next to the building that has hosted the Faculty of Law since 1958 and received the FAD Award in Architecture. The event, chaired by the Rector Dídac Ramírez, was attended by Claudi Alsina, secretary general of the Inter-University Council of Catalonia; Enoch Albertí, dean of the Faculty of Law; Jordi Puig, director of the Department of Infrastructures and General Services of the University of Barcelona; Sebastià Espinet, director of Operations at Sorigué, and the architect Enric Sorià. 

 

Foundation stone laying ceremony.
Foundation stone laying ceremony.
Institutional
27/10/2015

The foundation stone laying ceremony of the building that will host new facilities for the Faculty of Law took place on Tuesday 27 October. New facilities will be located next to the building that has hosted the Faculty of Law since 1958 and received the FAD Award in Architecture. The event, chaired by the Rector Dídac Ramírez, was attended by Claudi Alsina, secretary general of the Inter-University Council of Catalonia; Enoch Albertí, dean of the Faculty of Law; Jordi Puig, director of the Department of Infrastructures and General Services of the University of Barcelona; Sebastià Espinet, director of Operations at Sorigué, and the architect Enric Sorià. 

 

The new building will host twenty small classrooms, a room to carry out sessions of mediation, one mock trial room, about 150 teaching staff offices, fourteen big classrooms, four computer rooms, twelve meeting rooms, six working rooms, four offices for student unions and one teaching staff room. It will also host archive rooms, the audiovisual services and a dining hall. Moreover, the new building will host the degree in Labour Relations which is now taught on the Campus Diagonal Sud.  

 

Construction works, commissioned to companies Acciona and Sorigué, will be finished in the academic year 2017-2018. Works will have a total cost of 44million euros and will be funded by means of public-private collaboration: the University will begin to pay new facilities when works have already finished by means of half-yearly instalments during 10 years.

Currently, the Faculty offers the Bachelor's degrees in Law, Labour Relations, Criminology, Political and Administrative Sciences, and Public Management and Administration. Moreover, the Faculty has two joint degree programs in Law with North-American universities (University of Puerto Rico and Nova Southeastern University); these programmes enable students to take the Bar Exam, which legally qualify them to prosecute and defend actions at United States district courts. The Faculty also offers the UB-specific degree in Private Investigation as well as some other degrees taught in collaboration with other institutions. Regarding postgraduate programmes, the Faculty offers ten official masterʼs degrees and fifty-one UB-specific masterʼs degrees.

New facilities will meet teaching needs and contribute to increase academic quality. The Faculty of Law considers that the implementation of the European Higher Education Area, and particularly continuous assessment, has been successful. The centre pays special attention to incoming students who attend a tutorial session before they enrol on the degree, and they attend an individual and a group guidance session when lessons start. In addition, the Faculty offers specific tutorial action to students who combine their studies with professional sports, students with special educational needs or disabilities and excellent students. Nowadays, one out of five students who gets admission to the degree in Law obtains a score higher than 10 in university entrance examinations. New facilities will also allow Facultyʼs four teaching innovation groups to develop their initiatives and proposals.

It is important to highlight that the Faculty has set up a series of actions to facilitate student labour market insertion. Every year, more than one thousand students do an internship at any of the five hundred organizations that collaborate with the centre (companies, lawyerʼs offices, public administrations, courts, etc.). It also organises an annual employment and postgraduate education forum; symposiums on career opportunities and mentoring; workshops on how to face a recruitment process, how to write a CV, how to conduct a job interview; courses on legal English, etc. In addition, Faculty has a career guidance service that offers students individual counselling.

The new building will also host Facultyʼs research activity. According to the QS World University Rankings, the Faculty of Law of the University of Barcelona is the only Catalan centre included in the worldʼs 150 top law schools. It has twenty research groups, one research institute (TransJus) and four observatories (the Bioethics and Law Observatory, the Observatory of Globalization, the Institute of Public Law, and the Observatory of the Penal System and Human Rights). In 2007, the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics was founded at the University, and the Jean Monnet Chair was created in 2015. At the international level, every year the Faculty receives more than two hundred applications by foreign students. The Faculty has signed mobility programmes with European and American universities and, recently, an agreement that promotes student and teaching staff mobility was signed with Beijing Normal University. Moreover, the University of Barcelona is the only Spanish centre member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). The European association has created a working group to address the specific challenges that faculties of Law, a programme of pre-doctoral mobility and the LERU Law Portal, a site that brings together in one interface the legal research undertaken in the participating LERU universities which is available in Open Access.