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December 2020 Examination Diet

Edinburgh Law School would like to wish all students sitting exams this month every success during the forthcoming assessment period. Please take a look at the timetable information and guidance on this page ahead of your forthcoming assessment period.

Law School Exam Dates Academic Year 2020/21

Exams will take place between 10 - 21 December 2020 (including Saturdays 12 and 19 December 2020) at 13:00 GMT, so please ensure all electronic devices are set to UK Time Zone.

Course code
Course name
Start Date Start Time Venue
 LAWS08132 Public Law and Individual Rights  10 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS10156 Fundamentals of Competition Law  10 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS10200 Governance of the European Union  10 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08128 Scottish Legal System  11 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08127 Contract and Unjustified Enrichment
 12 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08126 Family Law (Ordinary)
 14 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS10194 Advertising, Commercial Speech and the Law
 14 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS11251 Criminal Court Practice
 14 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08142 Criminal Law (Ordinary)
 15 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08129 Jurisprudence
 16 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08114 International Law Ordinary (semester 1)
 18 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08135 Delict
 19 Dec 2020  13:00  Online
 LAWS08133 Property Law (Ordinary)
 21 Dec 2020  13:00  Online

Download full University of Edinburgh December Exam Timetable

Please note, changes can occur to the timetable therefore please ensure that you recheck your exam details immediately prior to your examination(s).

Special Circumstances

The University operates a Special Circumstances process to provide students with a route to ask your School to take into account any personal circumstances that may be affecting your performance in assessment.

We understand that the Covid-19 pandemic continues to have a significant impact upon our lives, in a variety of different ways. While Schools have redesigned your courses this academic year, taking into account the impact of Covid-19 will have on your studies, there may still be situations where you experience a unique impact as a result of the pandemic.

If you have been affected by special circumstances, you should submit information in writing to the Extensions and Special Circumstances service:

Extensions and Special Circumstances (ESC) service

Technical difficulties and late submissions

If you face any technical difficulties during your assessment, or your submission is late as a result of any technical issues, you should inform your School as soon as possible.

You should also, where possible, provide evidence of any issues e.g. screenshots/photos of error messages etc., so that this can be taken into consideration and if possible, steps can be taken in order to mitigate the impact on your performance. Where this is not possible, we would encourage you to submit an application for Special Circumstances via the Extensions and Special Circumstances (ESC) service website.

Academic Misconduct

We understand that there is some student – and staff – anxiety that academic misconduct by a minority in online assessment could undermine the fairness of the assessment process.

The University’s approach remains the same: we take all reported incidences of academic misconduct seriously and seek to ensure that they are dealt with efficiently and appropriately via the Academic Misconduct Investigation Procedures.

Examples of academic misconduct and what you can and cannot do in relation to assessment is available on our Academic Services webpages.

Affirmation Meetings

The University of Edinburgh have made one change to the Academic Misconduct Investigation Procedures by introducing the possibility of Affirmation Meetings.

The purpose of an Affirmation Meeting is to establish whether a student holds the knowledge that they have presented in work submitted for assessment. A student may be invited to attend a meeting with their Course Organiser and/or other member of staff to discuss their assessment and their understanding of it. Following this meeting, if there is continuing doubt about a student’s work, the matter would be considered further through the Academic Misconduct process.

Student Guidance - Affirmation Meetings

Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE)

Body

DECaDE’s mission is to accelerate research in Distributed Ledger Technology (aka `Blockchain’), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Human Data Interaction (HDI), working with industry and end-users to create the tools and techniques that will shape the evolution of the digital economy toward a new 21st century model of work and value creation, ensuring a prosperous, safe, and inclusive society for all.

Timelapse of Tokyo at night

Launched in October 2020, DECaDE is a 5-year National Research Centre exploring how emerging data technologies could transform our digital economy through decentralised platforms.

DECaDE is a partnership between the University of Surrey as lead institution, the Centre for Design Informatics and Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh, and the Digital Catapult.

Prof Burkhard Schafer, Professor of Computational Legal Theory at Edinburgh Law School, leads one of the research strands of DECADE, exploring the issues of  governance and regulation in the decentralised digital economy.

Law has always favoured hierarchical structures with clear choke points to get regulatory traction. Decentralised systems pose a number of unique challenges for the law, but also allow us to think about regulation in new ways.

Prof Schafer's research seeks to answer pressing questions about this new economy, including:

  • How can we involve users more meaningfully in the governance of these systems?
  • How can we protect worker’s rights in the decentralised economy, how does collective action look like in this world?
  • What role does the law play to facilitate new forms of artistic co-creation in these networks?

The next years will see crucial design decisions being made in buildings these infrastructures, and the project aims to ensure that they are fit for building a more just, sustainable and fair economy.

DECaDE is a partnership between the University of Surrey, University of Edinburgh, and the Digital Catapult.

It builds upon world-leading expertise at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) within Surrey’s Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP). These technical capabilities fuse with expertise in socio-economic modelling and digital business transformation within Surrey Business School’s Centre for Digital Economy (CoDE), and people-centric security and trusted systems within the Surrey Centre for Cybersecurity (SCCS). Edinburgh brings world-class human factors and design expertise via Centre for Design Informatics (CDI). DECaDE incorporates SCRIPT within Edinburgh Law School; an AHRC law and technology research centre focusing on the relationship between law, technology, commerce and society. Co-creation is driven through the Digital Catapult via both its DLT Field Labs and machine intelligence garage engaging diverse private and public sector end-users.

DECaDE is one of six research centres across the UK announced as part of a £29 million investment by UK Research and Innovation.

Learn more about DECaDE

Creative Economy

DECaDE focuses on the decentralised Creative industries as a case area for value co-creation in the DDE, where a shift from centralised content distributors (broadcasters) to decentralised platforms promise radical new business models that redefine how value is derived from digital content. Pricing and redistribution rights need no longer be defined by centralised publishers, but as part of an open market making micro-payments to content creators. AI technologies also bring new opportunities to radically redefine concepts such as ownership, content privacy e.g. who or what is in the video, what can be seen and heard, and how that influences redistribution rights. Emerging technologies also bring risk; AI can now create misleading ‘deepfake’ videos from a single photograph – what does this mean for the integrity of user-generated content that might be used in broadcast, or journalistic content disseminated in social platforms? We must design new socio-technical solutions to ensure these new models for content provenance and redistribution rights brought by technical innovations are communicated, and inclusive ensuring all creatives benefit from this emerging economy.

Data Trusts: Identity and Data in the DDE

Society has already begun to push back on organisations that silo and extract value from the deluge of our personal data. The solution is not necessarily to put up walls or locally silo / isolate data, but to enhance data fluidity so it moves dynamically with granular access control, generating value for its owners.

DECaDE will empower users to identify areas of potential value in their personal data, and explore novel models for releasing that value through decentralised technologies in where users exercise greater agency over its use through novel economic and governance models. For example, the concept of ‘Data Trusts’ is emerging in which third parties commoditize users’ data for them. What would a decentralized data trust look like? What other kinds of value could be extract from data, in new ways? For example, we will explore how the provenance of data used to train an AI model might be used to define shared ownership (digital equity) of that model when commoditised. We will explore training of AI models on individuals’ data in a privacy preserving manner through decentralised and federated machine learning – a kind of distributed computing. We will draw upon our partner expertise to understand the implications of GDPR in this context.

Working in the Decentralised Economy

The DDE has contributed to the emergence of the gig economy. Evident in lower-paid sectors such as delivery or transport, and increasingly in professional services such as the creative and healthcare sectors it may become unusual to work for single, monolithic organisation. Rather, work records and thus career will be reflected in a portfolio of engagements with multiple employing entities, often mediated via online platforms where employer and employee may not physically meet. The shift in employment norms challenge definitions of trust, and in a gig economy the value (fairness, worth/compensation) of work and as such and the values work represents in future society. Where reputation weighs heavily on an individual’s record, the absence of trusted centralised organisation will create a social and technical challenge, requiring the development and adoption/governance of a technical solution (RC4) and layered onto that appropriate models for decentralised governance including ways to evolve that governance model by consensus, and to penalise unfair behaviour on the platform. It will be necessary to design such platforms to be inclusive across society and to tackle digital literacy particularly around decentralised technologies and their inherent trust attributes.

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