LawTransform: Effects of Rights & Law

The project aims to consolidate the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (LawTransform) as a leading hub for scholarship on the use of law as an instrument of social change, and to advance high-quality research-based education in this field in Norway and abroad. Background and purpose: Our project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars […]

The Scandinavian rights revolution: Individual rights, civil society mobilization and democratic change.

The project explores how and whether civil society in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have shifted to a rights-approach. An approach that can facilitate the use of courts in working for the fulfilment of rights. Has the development of rights and judicial review been driven by European institutions and Norwegian judges, or does civil society have […]

Land Rights, Environmental Protection and Inclusive Development within India’s Federal System

Abstract: India faces serious challenges in constructing development paths that are socially inclusive, ecologically sustainable and politically feasible. The main goal of the research project is to understand how the legal regimes adopted to protect vulnerable groups and ecosystems interact with the socio-political dynamics of the Indian federal system. Moreover, we aim to understand how this […]

Juridification and Social Citizenship

Far-reaching processes of juridification are perceived to be at work in Norwegian society and globally, with expanding and more detailed legal regulation, legal regulation of new areas, conflicts and problems increasingly being framed as legal claims, authority shifting from political bodies to courts and other judicial and quasi-judicial bodies,  and a development where a judicial way of […]

Regulating Religion: Secularism and Religious Freedom in the Global Era

The contemporary moment is marked by an unprecedented “faith” in the law (Comaroff 2009). The aim of this multidisciplinary project is to provide new and critical understandings of the dilemmas involved in both protecting and enforcing “religious freedom”. What is all-too-often ignored in current invocations of this celebrated idea(l), is that in order to enforce […]

Law, Democracy and Welfare

Political, civil and social rights for citizens are prerequisites for a functioning democracy. Furthermore, legal developments in various areas of the welfare state have important implications for the construction of  ‘social citizenship’, i.e. the institutional framework which ideally, should ensure citizens’ opportunities to participate in society as equal and free citizens. The focus of the research […]