The Law School's Research Centre

The Sciences Po Law School is not only a place of teaching, but also a research unit, with some twenty professors, forty doctoral researchers, affiliated researchers and post-doctoral students. The research centre hosts Sciences Po's doctoral programme in law.

The research carried out at the School of Law aims to decompartmentalize legal research, to identify the historical trajectories and theoretical and epistemological foundations of legal objects, to identify emerging areas of law and to analyze the legal challenges of globalization and contemporary crises. The research team covers a broad spectrum of branches of law, from public law to private law, from international law to legal history, from comparative law to discrimination law, from the regulation of digital networks and technologies to the law of the environmental crisis.

The EDD's scientific project is defined around a common grammar combining reflection on the operations of law, interdisciplinarity and a critical, pluralist and global approach.

In addition to the rich and varied individual research conducted by its members, the Law School's research center focuses on three main areas:

• Legal culture and humanities: Several of the Law School's research projects examine the legal object, its genealogy, construction, uses, operations and culture, drawing on the resources of anthropology, philosophy, history, aesthetics, literature, art and comparative law. This line of research examines legal culture in terms of its internal workings and social reality, the development of its thinking and modes of reasoning, as well as legal cultures in the plural, particularly the exchanges and porosities between legal systems. It also explores the imaginary of law, what it produces as a world and a narrative, and how the world constructs it in return. A dialogue between law and the humanities has been particularly promoted. 
• Political economy of law: The School of Law works to understand the forms of economisation of law, the links that are established between the market and standards, in particular through its research into the economic analysis of law, competition and innovation law, international arbitration and environmental challenges.  Work has also been developed on contemporary transformations in property, the commons, liability and obligations. This focus on the political economy of law raises particular questions about the distributive aspects of law and its impact in terms of global justice.
• Globalization, Crises and Transitions: The School of Law has developed a particular critical approach to the global transformations of society and law, which seeks to clarify the contours and content of a 'global law' and to think about the law by proposing a non-status-centered approach to the production of norms, focusing on globalized transnational law and global legal objects. This critical perspective on globalization focuses in particular on the various crises and transitions that have become part of our contemporary world, whether ecological, digital, security-related, social, democratic, migratory or health-related. The research carried out focuses in particular on the situation in the Global South and on post-colonial and decolonial approaches, which are considered essential for thinking about the globality of law in a plural way.

Discover the Research Centre

• Research Team
• Research Projects
• Research Events Calendar
• Latest publications

Contacts of the Research Centre 

• Séverine Dusollier, Director 
• Julie Babin d'Amonville, Secretary General
• Pierre Grivaz, Research Manager 
• Claire Rameau, Administrative Officer