The Law School's Research Centre

Doing research in many fields with a critical insight

The Law School at Sciences Po is not only a teaching establishment but also a research unit, which is composed of about twenty professors and about forty doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and research fellows. This research centre is home to Sciences Po’s doctoral programme in law.

Research conducted in the Law School seeks to break down the boundaries of legal scholarship, to retrace the historical evolution and conceptual foundations of legal forms, to identify emerging territories or dimensions of law, and to reflect on the legal aspects of globalisation. Scholarship in the Law School ranges across the different branches of law, notably international law, property law, intellectual property, human rights, legal history, legal theory, comparative law, European law, international arbitration, law and gender, and law and discrimination.

Alongside the rich and varied projects pursued by its individual members, the Law School has a number of collective research projects, which address three broad themes.

Legal cultures: Researchers at the Law School are engaged in a number of projects which draw on anthropology, history, and comparative law to explore legal cultures: that is, the interrelationship of normative orders, the particular modes of reasoning, argumentation and writing that characterize legal thought, and legal techniques and operations.
Globalisation: The Law School has evolved a distinctive critical approach to the global transformation of law and society, which seeks to discern the contexts and contents of ‘global law’, and to develop a perspective on the production of normativity that is not ‘state-centric’ but which focuses on transnational law and norms of soft law.
The economic dimensions of law: Projects within the Law School seek to elucidate the different modes of economisation of law, and to specify the linkages between norms and markets, notably from the perspective of the economic analysis of law, competition policy, innovation, big data, and the question of the environment. Projects also explore the contemporary transformations of liability, obligations, property, and the commons.

Research within the Law School takes a critical, interdisciplinary, approach to law, which is understood in global and comparative terms.

The School of Law is the home of the Bentham Centre (FR) and the Law and Economics Policy Institute (LEPI), which it co-founded. The School is also currently the base for a CIVICA project on the theme of ‘Europe revisited’, which is directed by Loïc Azoulai.

Séverine Dusollier has been Director of Research at the Law School since September 2020.