Completed projects
Below, you can find information about our completed projects.
Completed Collective research projects
Researcher: Alexandra Andhov
Project description: Copenhagen Legal/Tech Lab was an interdisciplinary community-based lab at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, working at the intersection of law, innovation, and technology.
Website: Copenhagen Legal Tech Lab
Researcher: Ole Hansen
Project description: Digital systems for governance of construction projects were evolving rapidly. The use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and other digital tools seemed to facilitate increased integration between individual businesses, thereby challenging traditional contract models and fundamental principles of, e.g., contract and procurement law, intellectual property law, and civil procedure. The research project aimed to identify and analyze the legal implications of digitalization and BIM in Danish and international construction project settings.
Webpage: Digital Construction Law
Researcher: Vibe Garf Ulfbeck
Project description: The research project aimed to identify and analyze organizational challenges and related liability questions in the maritime sector caused by challenges such as sustainability requirements and automation.
Researcher: Yoshifumi Tanaka
Project description: The research project aimed to present a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the normative systems, including private governance systems, that governed the Arctic and Antarctic.
Webpage: Polar Law and Private Governance
- AMF Project (in Danish only) (pdf)
Completed PhD projects and doctorate degree projects
Researcher: Rasmus Grønved Nielsen
Project description: This research project examines the use by administrative authorities of contracts as means of public management vis-à-vis private persons and enterprises with special regards to contracts related to the exercise of public authority (“administrative contracts”/“Verwaltungsverträge”/“contrats administratifs”). The primary object of the study is to assess whether it is possible on the basis of case law to construct a general legal framework regulating these sui generis contracts. The answer is affirmative, and the dissertation highlights the necessity of conducting an integrative private/public law analysis to grasp the concrete legal issues at hand. The dissertation focuses on Danish law, but also draws on foreign experiences and approaches, mainly Norwegian, German, and French law. Administrative contracts form a significant feature of the legal infrastructure supporting the type of Private Governance systems that depend on collaboration between the private and public sector. Particularly, to some extent administrative contracts can be seen as devices of self-regulation.
Project result: The result of the project is a doctoral dissertation published by Karnovgroup.
This PhD project concerns the legal qualification of liability for ancillary advisory services, e.g. advice given in connection with entering into a contract. The project focuses on the limits for the contractual liability vs. tort law liability using case law from the financial sector following the financial crisis as an example and starting point for a thorough and theoretical analysis. The project also looks to private/public settlement agreements between private (financial) institutions and states giving rights to compensation for consumers.
PhD fellow Emilie Katrine Friis
Researcher: Berdien B E van der Donk
Project description: This PhD project focused on the limitation of users' protection of European fundamental rights through user term-based agreements on (large scale) online platforms. It took both a holistic approach to defining the online world in a legal sense (as a public utility, a service, or a hybrid) and a more dogmatic approach to determine whether private companies could exclude users' lawful content through unilaterally imposed contracts (user terms).
In the latter part, the first focus was the possibility of excluding a person from a platform through the application of user terms and assessed whether such an application could be regarded as an unfair contract term; the second focus addressed anti-discrimination principles and the obligation to contract.
This PhD-project analyzes the role of Danish courts in safeguarding substantive public policy (e.g. regarding unlawful gambling or usury) in civil litigation. Part hereof is analyzing the extent to which courts for such purposes has authority to deviate from the principle that the parties to the dispute – and not the judge – has the mandate and responsibility of collecting and presenting the evidence, claims and allegations of the case. In addition, the project will perform comparative studies of different jurisdictions to analyze different models for defining state courts’ authority to safeguard substantive public policy in civil litigation.
Researcher: Maria Edith Lindholm Gausdal
Project description: This PhD project concerns the integration of labour and labour related human rights clauses in both private and public commercial contracts. The primary purpose of the project is to explore legal differences and similarities of such labour related CSR-clauses in these two contractual settings in order to determine best contractual practices, to uncover the implications of such terms as regulators including their potential impact on basic contractual concepts.
Project result: The result of the project is a PhD dissertation (not published yet).
Researcher: Sara Spiro Svendsen
Project description: This project examines the possibility to apply ordinary tort law rules, including vicarious liability theories, on the corporate group. The project analyses the existing methods of reaching the pockets of the parent company for the faults of the subsidiary and then asks whether tort law could play a bigger role in holding the corporate group responsible. This question is discussed on the basis of concurrency theory where the traditional veil piercing theory and tort law theories are treated as parallel routes for liability. It is concluded that there are no insurmountable obstacles in applying vicarious liability models on corporate groups although some adjustments are required to overcome the limits imposed by the general principle company law principle of limited liability.
Project result: The result of the project is a PhD dissertation (not published yet).
Completed PostDoc Projects
Researcher: Max Usynin
Project description: The postdoctoral research project examines the relationship between public regulation with extraterritorial effects and private governance mechanisms as applied and implemented by shipping actors. The emerging regulatory framework for the prevention of modern slavery in maritime law represents one example of such shared public-private governance. The project aims at building a theoretical framework for the shipping actors’ compliance with the increasing number of regulatory acts of extraterritorial application, as well as studying their responses (modern slavery statements) in order to identify the common challenges of the industry.
Researcher: Léonard Van Rompaey
Project description: This industrial postdoctoral project explored how trust in artificial intelligence (AI), among other emerging technologies, was a key factor in public acceptance and uptake of the technology. It was deemed crucial to the commercial success of AI producers and the development of the tech industry at both national and European levels. For those reasons, it was also considered geopolitically vital as the AI technology race raged across continents. At other levels, AI disrupted legal systems and generated loopholes in liability regimes (including product liability). Unclear or unfair liability regimes were seen as risks that could severely affect trust. There was a possibility to use the precepts of Trustworthy AI to secure those liability regimes while simultaneously fostering trust at other levels. The AI act regulation project by the EU Commission moved in that direction by encouraging and framing private governance, which was expected to be more efficient in finding the specific frameworks of implementation required to foster trustworthy AI for clearer liability in each industrial sector.
This project analyzes the legal consequences of voluntary CSR health promotion initiatives in the workplace and their implications for public-private governance, employees’ rights, and employers’ liability. One objective of the research is to examine the overall legal consequences of the transfer of health promotion initiatives from the State to the workplace, as well as employers’ voluntary commitments to health promotion from the perspective of employment law, public health law, and private governance. Another objective of the project is to analyze the legal consequences of workplace health promotion initiatives for employees’ rights to privacy and non-discrimination from a comparative legal perspective.
This project explores the legal aspects at the core of railway operations. The area is highly regulated and presents extraordinary tensions between the national and the transnational; between the public and the private, and not least between a strong historical anchoring and the future. The longstanding connection between the railway and the nation-state has been profoundly influential for the current regulatory status quo. At the same time, a need for transformation towards transnationality is also widely recognised (and reflected at regulatory levels) to win back lost market shares and realise the potential as the future of sustainable transport in itself and in a multimodal context. Despite these pressing matters, the research field presents itself as overall unchartered territory. With the objective to create a much needed foundational understanding from a theoretical and a practical perspective, the project sets out to map complex interrelations between heterogeneous sources of national, regional (EU) and international law. Focus of analysis is inter alia the interplay between private and public actors, the use of the contract, as well as state-driven and market-driven technical, safety and sustainability standards as governance tools. The project departs from Scandinavia as an example.
The rise of climate change litigation targets both states and private actors across different countries. Shipping industry has so far been spared from climate lawsuits, but is under increased political and legal scrutiny due to its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The centralized reform of the industry seeks compliance with more climate friendly regulations and will inevitably affect the ways ships are built, adjusted and used. The reform already provokes discussions about the changing landscape of maritime law, new contractual clauses and mechanisms of enforcement. However, the risks of climate change litigation are currently overlooked in the discussion. This project investigates the extent to which shipping companies could face climate change litigation as major users of oil.