Law School Law at the Top

The Master's in Territorial Governance: a dual degree from the Law School Sciences Po Grenoble

The Master’s in Territorial Governance is a dual degree program offered by the Law School Sciences Po Grenoble. It enables students to earn a dual degree based on the Law School Master’s in Local Government Law Law School the Local Government Management track of the Sciences Po Grenoble degree. It provides selected students with dual expertise in law, management, and local government administration.

This is an innovative master’s program designed to train senior administrative executives in the state and local public service (attachés and administrators, contract employees, department directors), senior political executives (directors and chiefs of staff, political aides), and high-level advisors (public law attorneys, consultants, audit firms) for the public sector of the future. It also prepares students, though to a lesser extent, for careers in the administrative judiciary (judges of administrative courts and administrative courts of appeal, judges of regional audit chambers).

On video

Check out the live stream from the UGA's Career Guidance and Professional Integration Center, featuring the academic directors of the Master's in Territorial Governance program.

 

A professional master's degree aimed at high-level positions

Students acquire a dual set of skills that is highly sought after: political science and public policy on the one hand, and law on the other, with a focus on local public administration. This allows them to combine cross-functional management skills with technical legal expertise. Students are thus perfectly equipped for their future roles at the helm of local governments (e.g., director of general services, department head, policy officer for a specific local initiative, staff member for an elected official, etc.) and more generally within the federal civil service, consulting firms, the nonprofit sector, etc.

Professional fieldwork is at the heart of this master’s program, with two mandatory internships in the first and second years.

It also emphasizes collective reflection and debate, whether through working groups, participation in the Law School territorial legal clinic, Law School the public action laboratory at Sciences Po Grenoble.

Applications, selection, and dual entry point for the degree

This highly selective program (10 spots per year; selection via Mon Master based on application materials followed by an oral interview) is designed specifically for students who wish to broaden their horizons in terms of subject matter and methodology. Particular attention is paid to applicants’ academic records as well as their professional and personal goals. It is open to students from IEP, law, political science, public administration, etc.

Depending on their background, students are primarily enrolled either at IEP or at the Law School, with the curriculum tailored to each individual case. All students must register on Mon Master. If students have a legal background, this registration is sufficient. However, if students have a political science background, they will be required—based on their qualifications—to apply for concurrent enrollment at the IEP in Grenoble in their fourth year in the Diploma in Local Government Management if they wish to join the Master’s program.

Intensive preparation for civil service examinations

Thanks to this dual expertise, students are particularly well prepared for civil service examinations. Students benefit from Science Po Grenoble's comprehensive civil service examination preparation program, which takes the form of labels.

This is evidenced by the fact that during their second year of master's studies or immediately thereafter, many students pass the competitive examinations for local government or state administration positions. It is even the strategy of the program to encourage students to take the competitive examinations during their master's studies rather than afterward.

A Master's degree of excellence for research and doctoral studies: the Steen Graduate School

In addition, the Master's in Territorial Governance is ideal for students wishing to write a thesis or even prepare for an academic career. Indeed, due to the multidisciplinary approaches offered by the Master's in Territorial Governance, this program allows students to prepare theses that meet the contemporary requirements of social science research, namely a high degree of interdisciplinarity.

In this regard, the Master's in Territorial Governance has developed a proactive approach by integrating the STEEN Graduate School (Societies in Economic, Ecological, and Digital Transition) at UGA. The Steen thematic program offers a comprehensive multidisciplinary cycle of graduate studies and research from master's to doctoral level at the crossroads of the social sciences (sociology, economics, management, law, political science): in the face of ecological, economic, and digital transitions, the STEEN research program aims to better understand and interpret these transitions through an interdisciplinary, innovative, and international approach to the humanities and social sciences. It is a research-based training program that gives students a decisive methodological and substantive advantage in obtaining thesis funding. The STEEN Graduate School itself has thesis funding contracts. The Master's in Territorial Governance can therefore also be chosen by students interested in academic research.

The Local Government Law Clinic

Since 2018, students enrolled in the Local Government Law track at the Law School have been participating in the Local Government Law Clinic, a unique learning environment in France, both in terms of its focus (local public administration) and its teaching methods (the “clinical” approach).

This clinic, the result of a partnership between the Law School the Grenoble Bar Association, is designed to enhance the legal education of students at the Law School , particularly through rigorous, supervised practical application of their knowledge in areas related to local government law in the broadest sense, that is, all areas of law that local governments must deal with in practice. It allows participating students to familiarize themselves with the concrete challenges faced by local governments, to review actual petitions, documents, and case files, with the goal of providing well-reasoned legal responses to the issues raised. The challenge for students is to find themselves in a situation as close as possible to their actual work in the context of their future professional lives. The work carried out by students within the clinic does not constitute legal consultation within the meaning of Law No. 71-1130 of December 31, 1971, but rather an educational exercise.

The clinic consists of an educational team comprising the clinic director, Professor Romain Rambaud, the head of the Grenoble Bar Association's Administrative Law Committee, Sandrine Fiat, lawyers wishing to offer students past or current cases, and, where applicable, teacher-researchers wishing to participate in the clinic's activities.

Lawyers are responsible for providing clinical training to students, following an adaptable three-session model:

1. Preparation and presentation of the case file to the students in the clinic: facts of the case, requests to be processed, main legal issues, expectations regarding proposed responses;
2. Monitoring students in the processing of their files, answering questions, providing updates;
3. Correction of final work submitted by students and grading. Where possible, at some stage during the processing of their files, students are put in direct contact with a representative of the local authority (member of a department, elected official, etc.) or a party involved in the case in question.

In the event that the clinic is approached spontaneously by a local authority, it determines whether it is possible to offer, in partnership with lawyers, an educational exercise to students following this request and under what conditions.