Projects of the Research Centre

SAB ProcBentham

The Bentham Centre, conscious that utilitarianism is one of the major currents of modern thought, offers a place for reflection on aspects and developments in various fields of learning. Relying on cross-disciplinary research, the Bentham Centre seeks to make known the thought of Jeremy Bentham, one of the most significant philosophers in the history of utilitarianism.

Founded on Bentham's manuscripts in their most recent state of scientific edition, the workshops evaluate presuppositions, roots, contexts, and effects of the utilitarian mode of thinking, and at the same time measure limits and identify objections to the theory. Situated at the crossroads of a vast international network, the Bentham Centre welcomes multiple viewpoints and methods, in fields as varied as practical ethics, legal theory, philosophy of language, intellectual history, economy or English studies.

Since 2013, the Bentham Centre has partnered with the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle's centre Cultures of Western Mediterranean Europe and the Université Paris Nord's Research Centre on Local Action to engage in the research program CODEBENTHAM (ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02). Beginning with Bentham's works, this projects aims to comprehend the emergence of codification as an intellectual and cultural structure, and to trace its diffusion beyond France and the strictly legal sphere.

There are three scientific objectives:

• Make a work of intellectual history by examining the contribution of Bentham, who invented the neologism "codification" and theorized in French this new form of legal rationality, to the diffusion of this normative paradigm in the heart of enlightened Europe
• Advance Bentham studies in transcribing and editing, through the Collected Works, Bentham's unedited French writings of the 1770s and 1780s
• Shed light on legal (post)modernity by examining, in the wake of Michel Foucault, how the model of the code is made available for more contexts and what results from this technology of governance

The workshops are hosted by Professor Guillaume Tusseau.

IMPACTEBU

The European Banking Union: its Impact on the EU and its Member States, and on Accountability Standards.

Diane Fromage, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, September 2020 - September 2022

This project aims to examine the consequences of the recent creation of the European Banking Union (EBU) within the European Union. 
Taking France, Germany and Italy as representative case studies – while Bulgaria and Sweden serve as points of comparison -, it analyses the impact that the creation of the EBU has had on the institutional balance at national and European levels. It also examines this impact from a multilevel perspective, assessing whether accountability is sufficiently guaranteed or whether any gaps have emerged.

Background of this project

The economic and financial crisis that hit Europe a decade ago showed that the rules in force in the European Union (EU) could not cope with a banking and debt crisis appropriately. To tackle this problem, the European Banking Union (EBU) was established (2013), leading to the EU gaining competences in bank supervision (Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM)) and bank resolution (Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM)). Both the SSM and the SRM operate under responsible EU bodies (the European Central Bank (ECB) and an EU agency, the Single Resolution Board (SRB), respectively), although they exercise these mandates in cooperation with Member States’ (MS) authorities (National Competent Authorities (NCAs) and National Resolution Authorities (NRAs)), which have retained important powers. EBU membership is mandatory for Eurozone MS but open to all MS. Other EU-wide initiatives, such as the creation of the European Banking Authority (EBA), complement the EBU, as do inter-governmental agreements (Single Resolution Fund and, soon, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) as a backstop). Because of all these reforms, EU and MS institutional systems have been modified considerably, and the resulting multi-level institutional framework is particularly complex.

Research Questions 

IMPACTEBU examines the following Research Questions: 

• How has the creation of the EBU affected the governance structure and the institutional balance at EU and MS levels? 
• How do both levels interact, and is administrative, democratic and judicial accountability sufficiently guaranteed? 
• Beyond this, how can these developments inform the on-going discussions on the completion of the EBU?

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895841.

Criminocorpus

Criminocorpus, which intends to promote the history of justice, crime, and punishment. Partner since 2007 with the research team Corpus Justice of the History Center of Sciences Po, Criminocorpus fosters a creative cooperation among researchers, archivists, documentalists, and collectors. Criminocorpus introduces to the public research tools, sources, articles, and virtual expositions.

HeiParisMax

Enfin, l'équipe d'accueil de l'École de droit participe au partenariat académique franco-allemand HeiParisMax. Ce partenariat favorise la coopération scientifique et les échanges de doctorants et de postdoctorants entre Sciences Po et l'Institut Max-Planck de droit public comparé et de droit international à Heidelberg, ainsi qu'avec la faculté de droit de l'Universität Heidelberg.

ERC INCLUSIVE (2014-2020)

Project supervised by Severine Dusollier.

The INCLUSIVE project aims at challenging our very perspective of legal entitlements to property by introducing the notion of ‘inclusivity’ into the legal tool-box. Whereas exclusivity is conventionally considered to be the core element of property rights, the emergence of shared and collective use of both tangible and intellectual resources gives a radical twist to our conception of property.

From the public domain in copyright, open access or copyleft licensing to the complex authorship structure of online ‘wiki’ creation and new forms of cohousing based on common spaces, all these property models rely on the lack or limitation of exclusive rights and the accommodation of symmetric entitlements of other individuals.

They can all be qualified as situations of ‘inclusivity’, that can be characterized by the absence of a power to exclude others and the collectiveness and interdependency of shared privileges to use a property resource. Yet, at present there is no legal tool available to us that can give adequate expression to such ‘inclusivity’. Existing scholarship attempts to bring such sharted and collective models of property within the notion of the ‘commons’ which is however, devoid of any normative content.

The INCLUSIVE project will study the allocation of resources grounded on inclusivity and the issues that arise in applying exclusivity based legal rules and principles to inclusive property models.

INCLUSIVE seeks to elaborate a legal model of an ‘inclusive right/entitlement’ that allows for organised collectiveness, enforceability and sustainability and to assess its applicability in selected fields. Instead of forcing exclusive rights on situations organised around inclusivity, the project radically innovates by rethinking the categories of legal interests, with new conceptual and methodological frameworks and adapted normative criteria. This legal concept could have multiple applications and play a substantial role in two major challenges of our times: the sustainability of natural or informational resources and the connected agency of individuals in the digital environment.

The INCLUSIVE project pursues three objectives:

• Describing and characterizing situations of inclusivity as opposed to traditional exclusive entitlements
• Assessing issues that may arise from the absence of legal recognition of inclusivity
• Formulating proposals for a legal framework of inclusive rights

Nudge Project

The Nudge Project: which intends to set out to analyze the emergence of new forms of normativity, whose distinctive features are a) their extralegal and non-coercitive nature, b) their influence on individual behavior. Far from being insignificant, this kind of normativity is increasingly taken into account in the drafting of public policies and the analysis of the interaction between individuals and social, political and economic institutions. The concept of « nudge » (Sunstein & Thaler, 2008), which consists of shaping individual decisions without coercion, best exemplifies these new normativities. The aim is to understand the sources, the conceptual framework and the practical implications of this new normativity.

FOLIE - Forms of Life and Legal Integration in Europe (2016-2019)

Project supervised by Loïc Azoulai.

Forms of Life and Legal Integration in Europe (FOLIE) is a research project which started in 2016 and aims at providing a richer understanding and a deeper critique of the European Union project, by exploring the relationship between forms of life and EU law. 

FOLIE’s objective is to tackle the role of European Union law in social relations and practices pertaining to migration, families, markets, territory, nations and other such formations of social life in Europe. To this end, FOLIE uses the conceptual metaphor “forms of life” to capture the way in which EU law features amongst a diversity of social practices that delineate and give form to lives in Europe.