Course summary

The MSc Regulation is based in the LSE Law School and the Department of Government and offers you the chance to study regulation within a systematic framework. Regulatory growth and reform has been an international 'policy boom' in recent years. Governments have increasingly used regulation in preference to other policy instruments. Transnational regulation – often involving a diversity of non-state actors – has become a defining feature of the international economy. Regulation therefore plays a central role in the contemporary understanding of law and public policy. As a field of study, regulation requires a multidisciplinary approach. Legal, political and economic issues are intertwined and each has to be understood to make sense of the overall process. The programme takes a distinctive multidisciplinary approach, which concentrates on institutional issues and behaviour in regulation – regulatory bureaucracies, interest groups, legislators and courts – in addition to the economic aspects of regulation. We aim to bring together the contrasting North American and European perspectives on regulation, and to juxtapose experience of regulatory practice with theoretical ideas about how regulation works.