Research

The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) investigates the causes and effects of the growing number of international courts across the world. During its first period of research (2012-2018), iCourts’ research projects focused on the empirical processes related to the creation of international courts. The projects related to the new iCourts research agenda enlarge the perspective and ask about the world that international courts and law are helping to create.

In collaboration with partner organisations, iCourts is hosting several projects addressing the current legal, political, societal, and technological challenges that international courts are currently facing. These projects (listed below) are supported by prestigious funding organisations. These include the European Research Council, the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions, the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Carlsberg foundation and the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

These projects constitute an essential point of reference for the interdisciplinary and empirical study of international law and courts, an effort continually led by iCourts.

Research projects funded by:

The Danish National Research Foundation

• European New Legal Realism and the Empirical Turn in Legal Scholarship

  The project studies the ongoing empirical turn in legal research and the prospects of providing viable theoretical foundations for an empirical basic science of international law.

• Turning Empirical? The Transformation of Scholarship of International Law (TEMPTATION)

  Focusing on scholarship of international law, TEMPTATION aims to theorize and conceptualize the alleged empirical turn philosophically and to study its scope and character empirically.

• International Courts and Megapolitics

  This project explores three different sources of internationalized mega-politics. This research’s focus is on the more extreme variant of this politicization, the judicialization of mega-politics and the role international adjudicatory bodies play in these politics.

• Regional Human Rights

  This project explores the explores the evolution of regional human rights. It seeks to provide a first systematic comparison of the institutional histories of the regional human rights systems in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

The European Research Council

• ERC Human Rights Nudge / Redesigning the Architecture of Human Rights Remedies

  For decades, human rights have been treated as the business of international institutions like the European Court of Human Rights. Yet, the respect for human rights on the part of governments has been invariably weak.

• ERC IMAGINE

  The project investigates constitutional imaginaries behind the European integration project. The overarching objective is to provide a novel account informed by the intellectual history of both post-communist an “old” Europe.

• ERC JustSites

  JustSites studies the constellation, structure and functioning of “justice sites”, defined as the political, legal and professional localities beyond courts in which international criminal justice is produced, received and has impact.

European Commission and Research Executive Agency Actions (Marie Curie)

• Analyzing the Judgements of the European Court of Justice as Cultural Artefacts

  This project is conducted by Sabine Mair. It is funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, Individual Fellowship).

The Jean Monnet Erasmus+ Programme

• EUPoLex

  EUPoLex promotes excellence in empirical and interdisciplinary teaching and research in EU Studies. The action deepens the students and young professionals’ knowledge, competences and skills for exploring the intersection between EU Law and Politics, crucial for successfully developing EU-related academic and professional careers.

The Independent Research Fund Denmark

• ENERGIZE: Re-Shaping International Investment Law for the Green Transition

  ENERGIZE sets a platform to research International Investment Law in relation to green energy transition and to propose changes to enhance environmental protection.

• PACTA

  The overall aim of PACTA is to contribute new knowledge about how algorithmic decision making can be implemented in public administration without undermining the legality or losing public trust in the authorities that use this technology.

Other projects

• Chinese Legal Studies and Chinese Legal Culture: Digitalization and Sustainable Development

  The project will explore the development of Chinese culture and Chinese law from a Danish (Nordic) perspective in the context of globalization.

• COLLAGE

  The COLLAGE project consists of linguistic experiments to create a measurement of the effect(s) of framing on the use of analogical reasoning and the use of judicial precedent in legal decision making.

• Data Science for Asylum Legal Landscaping (DATA4ALL)

  Leveraging large-scale decision data in the Nordics, DATA4ALL pioneers a new research agenda combining data science and migration law to understand the significant outcome variations in asylum decisions within and across countries.

• DigiProf – A Digitalized Legal Profession: Challenge or Opportunity?

  This project explores whether and how the above presented recent technological developments are affecting the legal profession and the nature of legal work.

• Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Fairness in Asylum Law (XAIfair)

  XAIfair is an interdisciplinary project where data scientists (AI/XAI researchers) and legal scholars join forces to overcome the challenge of introducing meaningful XAI into a specific legal domain, namely Nordic asylum law.

• International Law & Military Operations (InterMil)

  his research project provides research-based public-sector consultancy within the field of military studies.

• LEGALESE – Danish Language Processing for Legal Texts

  LEGALESE is a joint venture by the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Law and Department of Computer Science, Schultz, and Ankestyrelsen.

• Nordic Refugee Determination: Advancing Data Science in Migration Law (NordASIL)

  NordASIL will produce a novel approach to answer two questions: What factors shape the production of national asylum decisions? and Why do asylum outcomes across similar cases differ so much from one another?

• SHIELD – Study Hub for International Economic Law and Development

  SHIELD is a research group at the Faculty of Law, examining the topics of international economic law, dispute settlement, and policy-making. SHIELD also studies significance of economic and non-economic values in these fields.