Commitment to intra- and inter-disciplinary research
Contemporary legal research as it is done in law schools is strongly involved with certain areas of politics and sociology, ethics and philosophical jurisprudence, as well as economics and political economy. There are also important links in the other direction: issues in politics, ethics and political economy often depend on and are informed by questions having to do with judicial interpretation. Crucially, there are key questions about the evaluation of legal institutions which cannot be tackled effectively without a substantial background in the social sciences and humanities.
With these challenges in mind incoming PhD students are assigned to one of our research themes, which aim to encourage transfer of knowledge across the sub-disciplines of law and stimulate dialogue with adjacent disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. The inter-disciplinary impact of this structure is realized by a range of discussion and reading groups which meet on a regular basis within the research streams. A wide range of colloquia, seminar series and international conferences, spread across the main research areas, make the school a place where international scholars and important ideas meet with our researchers.