Research
Focus areas
Our contextual approach to the study of law concentrates on three focus areas that function as lenses through which we put law into perspective. The three focus areas are the overarching topics that frame and shape the research projects of the center.
The first focus area concerns Culture, Concepts, and Values that, at any given time, form and shape law and legal thinking. Scholars applying this lens investigate the core concepts and values that govern legal thinking within and across different periods in time, for example privacy. How are concepts translated and transformed, decontextualized and re-contextualized across cultures and languages, and what values can successfully be invoked in legal argumentation across time and place?
In People and Institutions, focus is on the critical study of law as it manifests itself and is developed in the interaction - and at times tension - between citizens and institutions. The premise of this lens is that law and the development of law and legal institutions can be understood properly in context only. Law is developed in the interplay between individuals and institutions. A related area of interest is the interpretation of law and its utilization in different contexts. Interpretational practices are important areas of study because such studies inform us about the societal impact of law, and because different interpretations of law may eventually lead to changes in legal regulation.
Research applying this lens will be concerned with how digitization affects the way we understand law, and how it affects legal education, the legal profession, legal knowledge, and legal language. Another topic of interest will be the role of other kinds of new technology,. e.g. in the fields of policing and crime prevention. Technologies enabling automated face recognition, automated analysis of movement patterns, automated license plate recognition and other kinds of automated surveillance are developed at a very rapid pace, and some such technologies are applied in new contexts without much prior deliberation.
Ongoing projects
An important part of research activities in CIS are organized around collaborative projects that involve members of the center as well as partners outside the center. Members of CIS are currently involved in a number of large interdisciplinary research projects, most of which are externally funded:
ANIMALAW - An interdisciplinary study of Danish animal welfare offences in animal transport
Together with Professor Mette S. Herskin (AU), as well as colleagues from University of Copenhagen, Associate Professor Louise Victoria Johansen will investigate how broader societal conceptualizations of human- animal relations interact with specific veterinary knowledge when animal welfare cases are decided upon in Danish courtrooms. The research aims to provide a unique insight into the interdependencies of legislation, animal welfare and biological expertise, as well as to create a strong interdisciplinary research network between legal, social and natural sciences.
ANIMALAW is financed by an interdisciplinary grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF2).
EXCEL - Exceptional Prisoners in Exceptional Prisons: Challenges to Order in the contemporary Danish Prison Service
The project is headed by Associate Professor Julie Laursen and supported by a Sapere Aude grant from DFF. EXCEL’s overarching aim is to advance our understanding of order, conflict and staff-prisoner relationships in the Danish Prison Service by investigating three different groups of prisoners who pose challenges to order. The three sub-studies synthesize the same overarching question: How is order perceived and produced in policy and practice in the contemporary Danish prison service? This question yields important knowledge about prisoners who challenge order, and how staff members try to contain it, as well as the ways in which order is locally negotiated. EXCEL will significantly enhance our understanding of the relationship between punitive policies and on-the-ground practices, and challenge current assumptions about the nature of punishment in the Nordic countries.
Prisoners’ Rights
Frederik Rom Taxhjelm is a PhD fellow and conducts research about prisoners' rights and their experiences of their own imprisonment. The project is co-financed by the Department of Human Rights and focuses on prisoners' right to a safe, meaningful and proportionate punishment. In international research, Danish prisons are described as particularly humane, but the Danish prison service presently experiences a major crisis with reduced staff, outdated buildings, a rising number of inmates, many disciplinary sentences and a lot of violence. Through qualitative interviews and a six-month fieldwork in a closed prison, the project seeks to investigate what this means for the experience of imprisonment. There is a special focus on exploring which groups of prisoners come under pressure when the prison system is burdened to such an extent. The project runs from 2021-2024.
Helle Porsdam’s Professorship in Law and Humanities is partly funded by the Augustinus Foundation. The idea is to further the study of law as it overlaps with the humanities. Concretely, this means focusing on two topics: 1) cultural (heritage) law - the legal-cultural issues involved in the preservation, conservation, exhibition and digitization of cultural/natural heritage; and 2) cultural rights - that part of human rights which concerns cultural issues.
A new lecture series is currently being set up as part of the UNESCO Chair and will be open to the general public: The KU UNESCO public lecture series on science, society and politics.
Thirteenth-century Danish town legislation and Danish language and cultural heritage
Funded by the Augustinus Foundation and Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansens Foundation. The project consists partly of a commented modern Danish version of the laws, and partly of a research element where a number of researchers from Denmark and abroad cooperate on a project about regulation of thirteenth-century Danish towns.
Background of the project
Language is one of the important monuments over the Danish immaterial cultural heritage and one of the most significant elements of the collective identity: a historical databank of knowledge of all the conditions of life, which language users have acquired over generations and shared with each other. Language can unite or divide nations.
The oldest traces of the Danish language are found in runic inscriptions from the Iron Age, but they are few, brief and difficult to interpret. The fullest and most giving source of early Danish language comes from the legal world, which, then as now, was a central entity in the regulation of society and control of the material values.
To say language is also to say dynamic development, and we cannot understand the mother tongue, if we do not have eye for the radical changes that the language underwent after the Christianisation, where Latin became the written language of the elite, and thus the language that shaped the formulation of law and morale.
The foundation of both Danish law and Danish written language stems from the thirteenth-century, where laws of the realms three countries and for the growing towns, the market towns, was developed and written down. These laws will be the foundation for law and its language in Denmark far into the nineteenth century, and traces thereof can still be found in both legislation and legal thinking.
The two types of legislation, for market town- and the realms three legal provinces, has in no way received the same attention in research or in the national narrative about the middle ages, where the Danish provincial laws and especially the Law of Jutland (1241) with the iconic prologue about building the land with laws has been given special status. Town legislation has on the other hand been rather neglected, probably because it has been seen as local history without greater interest for the national development, where the particular Danish has been a strong component in the cultural historical narrative about the legislation of the middle ages.
Thus, only a few of the Danish town laws from the thirteenth century (Roskilde, Copenhagen and Ribe) are available in Danish, and unfortunately, only in severely outdated translations, which do not live up to today’s readers linguistic prerequisites. When it comes to research, the picture is the same: the contributions are few, sporadic and all aged, and no younger researchers deal with the town laws – neither linguistically nor in terms of content. The lack of research into town laws stands in stark contrast to the medieval archaeologists, who in the last decades has contributed substantially to the uncovering of the material cultural heritage in the cities, and who in coming years will publish its results. Thus a breach in the research’s food chain occurs, since legislation is an important interpretation tool for the many archaeological achievements, which now are not being exploited due to lack of availability. The laws are certainly available in scientific text-critical editions, but in the original language, Latin and Old Danish. Even among researchers, knowledge of these languages is unfortunately so limited today, that the editions are a closed land for practically everyone.
The project will both open new perspectives for research and lead to an increased consciousness regarding the Danish linguistic and legal cultural heritage. The project is centered around the thirteenth century, which in the Middle Ages is the legal developments most formative period, where laws are formulated and written down, while densely populated areas – the cities – are pulled out of the “regular” law and is given its own legislation and judiciary. These partly opposite, partly unifying currents are neither linguistically nor materially researched, but both tendencies are essential for the understanding of the creation of the Danish legal language in a field between the Latin and Danish linguistic cultural heritage. It is likewise here we find the roots to the relationship between the urban and the rural, and thus the division between land and city in the sense of self, which still affects the modern society.
Execution of the project
The project is led by Professor Helle Vogt, CIS, with assistance of senior editor Anders Leegaard Knudsen, who will preside over the philological research and the preparation of the translations. The research group consists, beside Helle Vogt and Anders Leegaard Knudsen, of Professor Per Andersen, Odense, Professor Bjørn Poulsen and Associate Professor Jeppe B. Netterstrøm, Aarhus, Associate Professor Johnny G. Jakobsen, Copenhagen, senior researcher Grethe Jacobsen, Royal Library, Professor Kurt Villads Jensen, Stockholm, Professor Kirsi Salonen, Bergen, Associate Professor Miriam Tveit, Bodø, Professor Em. Bertil Nilsson, Gothenburg, Dr Tobias Boestad, La Rochelle. The project will be executed in cooperation with The Danish Society for Language and Literature, who will create a professionally competent supervision group, who will both be a part of constructive dialogue and guarantee the quality of the translation project.
Completed projects
Indeterminate sentencing and imprisonment – an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of court processes and prison practices
Our understanding of the specific pains and possibilities of contemporary experiences of indeterminate confinement in Denmark remains limited. Using ethnographic research methods, IndeSent provided an in-depth examination of the experience of being indeterminately sentenced by a court and of serving an indeterminate sentence in prison.
Results from the project can be found here:
- Article in the danish journal Juristen: Forvaring i retten og i fængsleti:Juristen Årgang 2024 Nummer 3/4 (2024) (kb.dk)
- Moral Communication in Court: Johansen, L. V. & Laursen, J. (2023): Moral Communication in Court. I: Courtroom Ethnography: Exploring Contemporary Approaches, Fieldwork and Challenges. Flower, L. & Klosterkamp, S. (red.). Palgrave Macmillan, s. 161-177
Aided by a grant of 4.7 Mil. DKK by the Council of the Danish Victims’ Fund, Lars Holmberg, Lin Adrian, Louise Victoria Johansen and Ida Helene Asmussen investigated victims’ perceptions of the judicial process. In the project, victims’ experiences and the perspective of institutional actors were combined and examined through observations and interviews. The objective was to bridge a gap in international victimology research, to enhance our knowledge regarding victims in the judicial system, and to create an informed basis for improvements in legislation and legal processes. This project primarily addressed the centre’s focus area of People and Institutions.
Publications
Holmberg, L., Johansen, L. V., Asmussen, I. H., Birkmose, S. M., & Adrian, L. (2021). Victims’ rights: Serving victims or the criminal justice system? An empirical study on victims of violent crime and their experiences with the Danish police. International journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, 45(1), 89-104.
Johansen, L. V., Adrian, L., Asmussen, I. H., & Holmberg, L. (2023). The power of professional ideals: Understanding and handling victims’ emotions in criminal cases. International review of victimology, 29(2), 236-258.
Asmussen, I. H., Adrian, L., Holmberg, L., & Johansen, L. V. (2022). The victim as policy agent? Exploring a single case from Denmark. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 28(1), 79-95.