Bachelor and Master Theses

General

Prof. Atamer supervises Bachelor's and Master's theses within private law, comparative private law and consumer law - usually within the framework of a seminar paper. In justified cases, however, an exception can be made for Master's theses.

The following requirements also apply to Bachelor's theses. As far as this website does not provide any guidelines, the information sheets and decisions of the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich apply.

Seminars

Current seminars of the chair can be found here.

Procedure

If you would like to write a Master's thesis at the Chair of Atamer outside of a seminar, please contact the Chair by e-mail (lst.atamer@ius.uzh.ch). You are requested to submit the following personal data and certificates of achievement electronically:

Personal details

first and last name;
e-mail;
Immatriculation number; and
number of semesters.

Certificates of achievement

BLaw certificate; and
MLaw transcript of records (if available).

Master's thesis

as precise a description as possible of the topic to be dealt with (ideally disposition);
start date of the thesis;
expected submission date; and
intended number of ECTS credits.

After your request has been reviewed, you will be informed as soon as possible about the further procedure. For capacity reasons, only a limited number of papers can be supervised outside of a seminar per semester.

Scope

Bachelor theses for 6 ECTS comprise 20 pages with a maximum of 50,000 characters.
Master's theses of 12 ECTS comprise 40 pages with a maximum of 100,000 characters.

The number of characters refers to the pure text part including footnotes, but without cover page and indexes. 1 page corresponds to 2,500 characters including spaces.

Content

By writing a Bachelor's or Master's thesis, students should demonstrate that they

can independently work on a legal problem according to scientific principles;are able to find relevant legal sources, literature and case law on a topic and reproduce them in a structured manner;
master the legal methods of argumentation; and
if required, acquire knowledge of other legal systems and be able to compare this with solutions under Swiss law.

Formal Requirements

A thesis written according to scientific principles is expected. It is therefore recommended that you refer to a relevant work (such as Forstmoser/Ogorek/Schindler, Juristisches Arbeiten, 7^th ed., Zurich 2023) for the appropriate formal layout and citation.

With the exception of the following aspects, you are basically free to format your work as you wish. However, you should pay attention to formal consistency.

A margin of 4.5 cm to the right and a line spacing of 1.5 must be maintained. Furthermore, the paragraph should be formatted in justified text with automatic hyphenation. Error-free language as well as clean legal terminology is required.

The paper must be dated and signed. At the end of the paper, the declaration according to the leaflet on correct citation and avoidance of plagiarism must be added. This does not count as part of the text and is not taken into account when considering the number of characters.

The thesis has to be handed in digitally. Please send a word and a PDF file of it to the chair (lst.atamer@ius.uzh.ch). Handing in a hard copy of the thesis is not necessary.