Research

Bentham Centre

The Bentham Centre, which unites researchers dedicated to disseminating the thoughs of the English philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

Bentham Centre's website

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.

Crimonocorpus' website

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.

Nudge project website

The INCLUSIVE Project

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