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A history of breaking down barriers

The Centre for Commercial Law Studies was borne out of a single vision: To create better outcomes by breaking down the barriers between law as an academic discipline and law as commercial practice.

CCLS Postgraduate Law Students in a group photo outside Cumberland LodgeIn 1980, it was this vision that prompted Sir Roy Goode to establish CCLS, an environment where practising commercial lawyers and academics could meet and collaborate. The result? Academic excellence that effects genuine change.

The CCLS approach has three overarching principles: an international and comparative perspective; close collaboration with the professions, business and other stakeholders; and a multidisciplinary approach to developing new knowledge. These approaches have created a distinctive learning environment – we are one of the largest post-graduate law centres in Europe, offering the widest variety of commercial law topics.

Throughout our 40 years we have produced significant work in areas relating to competition law, banking and finance, and fast-moving areas of law with a cross-border or international dimension. These include:

  • Our Cloud Legal Project, which publishes research on a broad range of topics in Cloud Computing, which in turn influences legislators, regulators and policy makers
  • The Sovereign Debt Forum, a project which aims to assist low and middle-income countries with urgent sovereign debt policy problems.
  • Pioneering research that demonstrates that unlawful anti-competitive patenting strategies of pharmaceutical companies worsen problems of access to medicines.
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