Law and Public Policy course in an undergraduate Public Policy Management School at University of São Paulo - reflections based on practice

Abstract

In 2005, the Public Policy Management course at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP) was founded. In 2019, the discipline “Law and Public Policies” was included among the possible electives in the grid and its published syllabus. In the second half of 2022, in turn, the discipline was offered for the first time to EACH students. This article aims to present the themes and didactic issues involved in the elaboration of the discipline's proposal, as well as to report and discuss the results of the first experiences in the classroom. The article is organized into five sections. The first briefly reports the history of the public policy field, of the Public Policy Management course at the USP School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities and the context of the creation of the subject “ACH3857 - Law and Public Policy” as an optional discipline. The second section presents and discusses the reasons for the differences between the program foreseen in the 2019 menu and the program effectively offered in the second half of 2022. The third part is entitled “Comments on the chosen bibliographies”, and presents the reasons for the choices and what could be different in an eventual second offer of the course. The fourth section presents some of the discussions that were interesting throughout the course. These discussions were organized around the notion that the law plays roles with public policies. In the final considerations, a reflection on the role of this optional discipline and legal disciplines for the formation of the Bachelor in Public Policy Management.