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Law and change: Scottish legal heroes
Law and change: Scottish legal heroes

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

Law and change: Scottish legal heroes

Introduction and guidance

Welcome to this badged open course, Law and change: Scottish legal heroes.

The free course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three hours of study each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.

This course explores the legal system in Scotland and considers how individuals, institutions and organisations have made a difference by challenging the law or legal system.

You learn about the law-making process in Scotland, explore how the legal system has been influenced by change and consider how law has been used to respond to developments in society. Scots laws and lawyers have influenced development of laws on a national, regional and global level and you explore examples of this influence.

Following this course, you will also be able to explain and demonstrate a number of skills, including problem solving, argument and reasoning.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

  • understand the complexity of issues in law-making and application
  • discuss how laws reflect the society within which they are made
  • explain the role of individuals and institutions in effecting legal change.

After completing Law and change: Scottish legal heroes, you may like to enrol on these free OpenLearn courses:

The Scottish Parliament and law making [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

Scottish courts and the law

Legal skills and debates in Scotland

And if you would like to take your study in this subject area further, sign up to the Open University course Law making in Scotland.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.