First Week of Classes at Trinity! 28 Sept - 2 Oct 2009

Wow, I'm actually doing this.  I'm in a classroom again, this time in a foreign country, in beautiful old buildings, at a college I thought I would never get into.  Scary as hell, yet life is too short, right?  In the excitement of the first week of class, it went by very fast.

To some, the LLM program may sound intense, but I'm on the fence with that one.  We're only in the classroom 6 hours per week, then we have exams in January.  New semester starts in mid-January, ends in April, then we have exams at the end of April.  Then our thesis is due July 31, 2010.  We have not yet been assigned our thesis supervisors, so until then I need to get brainstorming on how to narrow down my overall product liability topic.

Anyway, on to my first week of class. 

Globalisation and the Law: 
Location of classroom:  Museum Building (home to the Geology Dept.).  As you enter the building through ginourmous wooden doors, you are greeted by 2 skeletons of "giant Irish deer".  The building is absolutely gorgeous; it was a winning design of a competition to design a museum and lecture hall complex for Trinity in 1852.

The classroom is upstairs and reminds me of scenes from Dead Poets Society (no, it was not filmed here).  Wooden benches for seats and tables.  2 sets of large green double-chalkboards, which you can raise and lower via rope so as to allow both top and bottom to be filled with all sorts of education-goodness.

Professor:  Superb.  Professor William Binchy.  Anything I say here wouldn't do him justice, so see his long list of qualifications here.  Lovely older Irish gentleman who seems very excited in what he is teaching us, which I think is essential.  He gave us a thick set of handouts today; it looks like we will have a fair amount of reading in this course! 

side of the Museum Building

inside Museum Building.  

Entrance on left side.

Our classroom is up the stairwell you see on the right side of this photo.

Key Issues in Private International Law:
Location of classroom:  Law Building (conveniently next door to my dorm).
Same wooden bench seating, but much smaller classroom.  Similar to the room where we had our LLM reception. 

Professor:  Same prof as in Globalisation, but it appears that his PhD student may be teaching the course from today forward.  Interesting.  Several of us were surprised at learning this, as we were quite looking forward to learning from Binchy.

Product Liability in Europe:
Location of classroom:  Arts Building (next to Museum Building) and Law Building. 
Arts building classroom is nothing exciting.  No wooden benches, but instead classroom chairs with the wooden arm that pulls up for writing.  A bit more comfortable than the wooden benches.

Professor:  This course is split between Prof. Binchy and Prof. Schuster, whom I met at the LLM reception.  He'll take over around week 6, then Binchy finishes with the final class in week 11.


I won't bore you with detailed class descriptions - you can check them out here.

In all, it was a good first week of classes and went by lightning fast, with several other activities mixed in.  I'll blog separately about those.