PhD and Postdoc Projects

This PhD project, which is part of our general research project on Digital Construction Law, investigates the legal aspects of BIM. The main research question is, how BIM will affect and modify the traditional roles, obligations and responsibilities of the parties involved in construction projects. The project is based on a number of articles focusing on the main legal issues related to BIM. The two most important issues to be dealt with are 1) the legal interpretation of construction contracts involving the use of BIM and the definition of what most likely will be considered being the applicable law, e.g. in absence of clear contractual regulation, and 2) the aspect of collaboration and its impact on the traditional contractual organization in the construction sector resulting in multiparty contracts and contractual networks.”

PhD student Nicolaus Falk-Scheibel

Giant social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have increasingly become “gatekeepers” of the online information flow due to their essential role in regulating online speech. These private entities have built their own governance systems to address online objectionable content and are performing three roles simultaneously, acting like: (1) legislature, in defining what constitutes legitimate content on their platform, (2) judges, who determine the legitimacy of content and (3) administrative agencies, who act on adjudications to block illegitimate content. Under these private governance systems, private entities now perform a task that traditionally belonged to the state – governing free speech. Concurrently, governments around the world put pressure on these online intermediaries to remove undesirable site content in order to suppress hate speech, defamatory statements, privacy violations etc.

The primary objectives of this PhD project are to examine the interplay between private and public regulation of online offensive speech and to uncover the circumstances under which online intermediaries such as social media platforms can be held liable. The project will focus on online intermediary liability for defamation, but will also examine how speech types closely related to defamation, such as hate speech, privacy violations and “fake news”, are regulated under the private governance systems of social media platforms. In short, the project will explore on what basis online intermediaries can be held liable towards third parties for “under-removal” of illicit content as well as “over-removal” of protected speech.

PhD student Wendy Meng

This PhD project focusses on the limitation of users' protection of European fundamental rights through user term-based agreements on (large scale) online platforms and takes both a holistic approach to defining the current online world in a legal sense (as a public utility, a service, or a hybrid), and a more dogmatic approach to answer whether private companies can exclude users' lawful content through unilaterally imposed contracts (user terms).

In the latter part, the first focus is the possibility to exclude a person from a platform through the application of user terms and assesses whether such an application could be regarded as an unfair contract term; the second focus are anti-discrimination principles and the obligation to contract.

PhD Fellow Berdien B E van der Donk

The project forms part of the collective research project “Law and Private Governance for a New Understanding of Immigrant Integration” (LUII), led by Associate Professor Silvia Adamo, which aims at examining barriers to integration and the potential for private actors to promote integration within the Danish legal framework for integration.

The PhD project is socio-legal in its nature and examines effects of the legislation from the point of view of the people concerned by the law. The project specifically investigates to what extent immigrants in Denmark experience legal barriers in their access to employment, health care and housing. Further, the project explores current and potential roles of private actors, including companies, NGOs, trade unions, and housing associations, in promoting integration. The purpose is to examine to what extent an increased involvement of private actors in the legal framework could potentially reduce relevant barriers and thus facilitate integration better.

The project will be employing both qualitative (interview) and quantitative (survey) social scientific research methods and will be drawing on theory developed within the realm of sociology of law.

PhD student Maj Rørdam Nielsen

This PhD project investigates procuring Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and green infrastructures from legal and economics perspective. The research objective is to analyze procurement and sustainability tools to understand how procuring NbS can fight climate change. Greening the procurement process has been subject of the extensive legal analysis in the last years. However, the analysis has been focused on detecting obstacles and opportunities to translate broadly understood environmental objectives into legal terms. Where this project goes beyond the state of the art is firstly mapping conceptual differences between broadly understood environmental considerations and specific climate mitigation procurement approach. The innovative aspect of this PhD project is to analyze legal and economic tools to address climate change or mitigation through public procurement directly. For example, which elements or strategies can remove carbon and reduce the effects of climate change?
In the hypothesis of the researcher, project Nature-based Solutions - defined as solutions inspired, copied, or supported by nature – can help pursue the climate mitigation objective. This hypothesis will be tested in the PhD project. NbS may differ in kind, infrastructural complexity, and in terms of the climate-related risk, they address. However, among the most evident examples of NbS are the inclusion of green elements in constructions (green walls, green roofs), and inclusions of more simple green elements in the urban landscape (trees, meadows, parks, green side-lanes). The concept of NbS needs to be translated into legal terms and, more specifically, procurement terms. For these reasons, various phases of the procurement process will be analyzed with the NbS in mind. An economic analysis will support the legal research to bring evidence of the measurable elements of sustainability aspects of NbS.

PhD student Federica Muscaritoli

The project analyzes the legal implications of the international legal framework of sustainable development pertaining to maritime law, particularly on maritime commercial contracts. The implementation of sustainability clauses in maritime contracts will substantially impact the implementation of party collaboration. Thus, the project fundamentally evaluates various relevant aspects of contract law, such as the interpretation of sustainability clauses in order to assess their compliance with international green requirements. The project explores the general theory of contract law and the law of obligation by looking through a comparative lens, and further by virtue of considering both civil and common law legal systems and having a doctrinal approach that is also reflecting both private and commercial law perspectives.  

PhD student Vincenzo Battistella Marinucci

The amount of generated data has rapidly increased in recent years along with its potential to be used as input in machine learning algorithms. This offer companies new possibilities to optimise operations and create data-driven products. Therefore, businesses no longer limit themselves to utilising their own data, but also procure data externally. The PhD project investigates this emerging concept of data contracts in a business-to-business context from a comparative contract law perspective. More specifically, the project examines B2B data contracts through a comparative analysis of German, English and Danish law. The comparative approach has been chosen to take into account the inherent cross-border nature of data contracts. Additionally, the project utilises interdisciplinary methods in the form of insights from data science to align legal research with the technological reality.

PhD Student Nine Riis

This postdoc project is part of the project on Maritime Management, Organisation and Liability (Maritime Private Governance). It focuses on autonomous ships and concerns contracts as governance tools as well as liability aspects. More specifically, the project deals with various contract law aspects of the commercial implementation of fully autonomous and remotely-controlled ships, mainly focusing on outsourcing and management contracts for the externalization of risk. The project also focuses on third party liability aspects, including product liability issues.

Postdoc Asli Arda

This postdoc project is part of the project ‘Law and private governance for a new understanding of immigrant integration (LUII)’ funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. On the one hand, it contributes to the definition and development of the concept of immigrant integration within the EU and international legal frameworks. On the other hand, it aims at improving the state of play through the promotion of a different paradigm of integration geared towards greater inclusion of immigrants into the host society. To this end, it investigates the role of private governance, and specifically non-state actors such as trade unions, in undertaking integration tasks.

Postdoc Matteo Bottero

This industrial postdoctoral project explores how trust in artificial intelligence (AI), among other new emerging technologies, is a key factor of public acceptance and uptake of the technology. It will be crucial to commercial success of AI producers, and to the development of the tech industry, at both national and European levels. For those reasons, it is also geopolitically vital as the AI technology race rages across the continents. At other levels, AI also disrupts our legal systems, and generates loopholes in our liability regimes (including product liability). Unclear or unfair liability regimes risk severely affecting trust. There could be a way 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 goes in that direction by encouraging and framing private governance, which will be more efficient at finding the specific frameworks of implementation required to foster trustworthy AI for clearer liability in each industrial sector.

Industrial Postdoc Léonard Van Rompaey

This postdoc project is part of the Circular Supply Chains – identifying and allocating legal risks (CirCus) project, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Within the context of the waste and resource crises, there are increasing calls to transition to a circular economy, in which wastes are prevented or, where not possible, waste and resources are reused, recycled, and recovered for the purpose of sustainable development. Many mechanisms exist in law to promote circular economies. This postdoc focuses on one such mechanism: extended producer responsibility, where the producer of a product is responsible for it throughout its life-cycle. The overarching aim of the postdoc is to investigate the legal risks of adopting producer responsibility (including through ownership) and liability within private law and waste law to promote circular economies within the EU context. For this purpose, this research will: (1) assess the current legal risks context of producer responsibility and liability; (2) identify the impact of identified legal risks in relation to circular economy transitions and implementations; and (3) propose recommendations for the use of producer responsibility and liability to stimulate moves towards a circular economy. This project adopts a three-step user-centric, co-productive process to ensure usefulness of any insights to relevant stakeholders: a desk-based scoping review to map legal risks, a survey to triangulate, validate, and expand on the scoping review, and semi-structured interviews to provide insights on the risks and recommendations.

Postdoc Katrien Steenmans