Research methods in fundamental rights

Professor Joseph H. H. Weiler, is a Radbruch-Kantorowicz Visiting Professor at the Hertie School, a University Professor at NYU Law School, where he holds the European Union Jean Monnet Chair, and is Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In addition to being the director of the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at NYU, he is also Co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON). Among the many distinctions Professor Weiler has received is 2022's Ratzinger Prize, which was awarded by Pope Francis. Founded in 2011, the prize is considered the Nobel Prize for theology. It is awarded yearly to two scholars of any faith whose work has made significant contributions to theology.

This session will explore the relationship between research methodologies and research methods. It will reflect on what makes human rights a multidisciplinary field of inquiry and the different and combined research aims that can be pursued under the broad umbrella of human rights research. The class will then turn to why and how formulating clear research questions matter and the relationship between research questions and the justification and description of research methods employed.The class will conclude by focusing on how we can offer and receive constructive feedback on research methods - a key and transferable skill for undertaking peer review of research articles, book proposals and grant applications. 

This opening session will be led by Professor Başak Çalı.

Başak Çalı is Head of Research and Professor of International Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights,University of Oxford and Founding Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international human rights law, with a special interest in comparative human rights law. She has written extensively on the purpose, interpretation, legitimacy, standards of review and domestic impact of human rights law. Her work places human rights law in its broader normative and political context and has a dual interest in legal interpretation and law in action.

This masterclass looks at doctrinal research in the study of fundamental rights from a critical perspective. We will begin by unpacking the doctrinal method as a building block of legal research, examining its aims and underpinning assumptions. We will discuss whether the search for coherence, stability, and predictability that often drive doctrinal work are always achievable or, indeed, desirable. We will then introduce feminist critiques of doctrinal work in law. They question the presumed neutrality and objectivity of doctrinal (re)constructions in law and call instead for a situated understanding of law-making and legal interpretation. We will focus on feminist judgments projects – academic endeavours to rewrite real-world judicial decisions from a feminist perspective – as attempts to harness the creative and normative potential of doctrinal work. The creative methodologies employed in such projects show that robust doctrinal work may have underexplored radical potential.

This masterclass is led by Prof. Silvia Suteu.

Silvia Suteu is Professor of Law at the European University Institute in Florence. She teaches and researches in the areas of comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, gender and law, and human rights. She has particular interests in processes of constitution-making and constitutional change, in particular looking at deliberative democratic tools, entrenchment mechanisms, and unamendability. She has published widely on these topics and her book, Eternity Clauses in Democratic Constituitonalism (Oxford University Press 2021) was awarded the 2023 ICON-S Book Prize.

This masterclass examines the study of human rights law as an empirical object, emphasizing its unique explicit and implicit politicization. It is structured into three sections. The first addresses the enduring debate in legal scholarship—commonly termed the Methodenstreit—between doctrinal and empirical approaches. The second section explores key challenges in empirical research, including the use of samples to represent populations (of case law, jurisdictions, practitioners, etc.) and selecting proxies when studying complex phenomena. This discussion will be framed by the critiques raised by doctrinal against empirical studies. The final section proposes adaptations to rules of inference and statistical traditions from the social sciences to better suit the empirical study of human rights law. It will also advocate integrating (elements of) doctrinal analysis as a valuable empirical method.

This masterclass is led by Dr. Helga Molbæk-Steensig.

Helga Molbæk-Steensig is a postdoctoral researcher at the European University Institute where she focuses on the interplay between human rights and Artificial Intelligence in the ELOQUENCE.ai project. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Legal Studies and her research on judicial independence, the margin of appreciation, empirical legal methodologies, and intersections of law and artificial intelligence appears in a wide range of volumes and journals including the European Journal of International Law and the Leiden Journal of International Law. She has taught legal philosophy and human rights law at the University of Copenhagen and delivered guest lectures at universities in Italy and Germany. 
 

The masterclass will be structured in three parts:  The first part will take as its starting point the fact that in (legal) anthropological literature, many authors are highly critical of the universal aspirations of human rights. Reference will be made to a number of authors in this vein to situate this literature. The reasons behind this critical stance will then be outlined in the second part of this masterclass. First, and this is not unique to anthropological literature, until recently, universal human rights instruments were negotiated chiefly by countries of the global North, who in the post-war period had agreed more or less on the interpretation of human rights. Second, and more specifically, anthropologists in the field have observed and studied other types of protection mechanisms (individual and collective) that are not necessarily aligned with human rights but in specific contexts offer equivalent protection (e.g., the position of women in patrilineal societies, collective approaches to land and land ownership, or coping mechanisms such as ‘tontines’ or ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’). The final part will focus on the contemporary context, with illustrations of clashes between different views of appropriate protection drawn mainly from court decisions. These will highlight the difficulty of accommodating certain specific situations (e.g., discriminatory inheritance rules, underage marriages).

This masterclass is led by Professor Marie-Claire Foblets.

Marie-Claire Foblets is Director of the Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany, Professor at the Catholic University Leuven (Belgium), and Honorary Professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and the University of Leipzig (Germany). She has been teaching law and social and cultural anthropology at the universities of Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels for over twenty years. She served for several years also as co-president of the Association française d’anthropologie du droit (AFAD). Her research focuses on the application of Islamic law in Europe and more recently on the accommodation of religious and cultural diversity under State Law throughout the EU. In 2004, she received the Francqui Prize, the most prestigious academic award in the humanities in Belgium. She holds the title of doctor honoris causa from the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels (2016) and the University of Uppsala (2019). She is member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (2001) and also of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2015).

Legal research in the fields of human rights and refugee and migration studies is often associated with strong normative commitments to ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, encapsulated in the very rules ordering these fields. Discussions tend to revolve around prescriptive notions about how States and especially governmental authorities ‘should’ behave in light of the applicable norms and in the provision of value justifications for the arguments made. The difficulty of the normative method resides precisely in distinguishing positive-empirical from prescriptive-normative assessments of and about the law. While positivistic approaches strive to objectively explore and describe legal rules, delivering evaluations that aim to explain the law as ‘is’, normative approaches assess juridically relevant conduct as it ‘should be’, mobilising principles and values from within and beyond the legal realm. References to the ‘object and purpose’ of international Treaties feature prominently as a vehicle of this type of normatively laden discourse. How and when it is useful and appropriate to engage in normative explorations and how best to justify choices and build arguments around them will be the object of this session. We will discuss the risks and opportunities associated with normative research, looking specifically at the areas of migration and human rights law for illustration.

This masterclass is led by Professor Violeta Moreno-Lax.

Violeta Moreno-Lax currently holds an ICREA Research Chair at the University of Barcelona and is Full Professor of Law (on special leave) at Queen Mary University of London, where she has served as inaugural director of the Centre for the Legal Study of Borders, Migration and Displacement: (B)OrderS. She is Visiting Professor at the Hertie School during the Spring term of 2025. She specialises in international and EU migration law at the intersection with border violence, global security, and human rights. She regularly consults for UN agencies, the EU institutions, and other organisations in these fields. Her work has been cited by leading courts, including the Court of Justice of the European Union or the Belgian Conseil d’État. She is a Visiting Professor of the College of Europe, legal adviser and founding member of de:border, focusing on strategic litigation, and sits in the Editorial Boards of the European Journal of Migration and Law and the International Journal of Refugee Law. For further details on her publications consult her ORCiD, SSRN and Academia pages.

This masterclass will first explore the concept of a case study and how to design one, in particular how we select a single or a small number of comparative cases for intense examination from a universe of cases. By case, we do not mean a decision by a court, but rather a delineated study of a practice or process.  We will review a range of logics developed in social sciences that help justify selecting cases and consider examples of case study research in human rights. We will then turn to comparative method, in particular drawing on insights from comparative political science that have been applied in comparative constitutional and comparative international law, mainly in small ‘n’ studies. We will explore the rationales of comparison, and what questions may be answered by comparative study. 

This masterclass is led by Professor Başak Çalı.

The masterclass "Critical economic theory: The third and fourth worlds in human rights research" engages with various legal research methods directed at transformative change and bottom-up solutions to contemporary ills. As a central part of this exercise, we will explore approaches and theories that render explicit interests and assumptions that underpin international law. First, in reviewing legal research that centres on development claims of the Third World, we’ll learn about the boundaries set by the economic and political global architecture and the actors and beneficiaries traditionally favoured by international law. Second, we will home in on Fourth World approaches to international human rights law and novel articulations of the rights of indigenous peoples and peasants to land, resources, and control over the means of production. As much as this turn in human rights law foregrounds demands for new forms of political economy and economic democracy, it also makes explicit existing commitments and interests embedded in international human rights law. In the third part of the masterclass, we will consider structural challenges to the protection of socioeconomic rights and assess legal strategies and alternative epistemologies that seek not only to provide a remedy to victims but also to confront the structural sources of human rights violations. We will end our class by exploring tensions that many scholars have raised around reconciling critical scholarship with practical engagement.

This masterclass is led by Professor Margot Salomon.

Margot Salomon is an Associate Professor at LSE Law School and directs the interdisciplinary Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy at LSE Human Rights. Margot’s research addresses the roles and distributional effects of international law, with current projects focused on the emerging field of transformative international human rights law. Recent publications look at contradictions in the radical articulation of peasant rights (LRIL); new uses for the legal construct of indigenous property rights outside of capital accumulation (LJIL); and ‘utilities’ served by the regime of sovereign debt (TLT). Margot is the Laureate of a Francqui Chair and winner of a European Society of International Law book prize (with Linarelli and Sornarajah). She has been a consultant to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on extreme poverty, the World Bank’s Nordic Trust Fund, and Advisor to the UN High-level Task Force on the Right to Development. Margot is a member of the inaugural Editorial Board of LSE Press, a fully open-access publishing house.

This masterclass will introduce process-tracing - a qualitative social science method used for unpacking causal relationships and examining processes of change. We will investigate the main concepts of process tracing and how those can be applied in human rights research. In particular, we will explore how we can study changes in institutions, actors, treaties, and case law in the area of fundamental rights. Coming from our own research experience, we will discuss which practical challenges can emerge and how to integrate different data sources. 
 
This masterclass on process-tracing is led by Dr. Francesca Palmiotto and Dr. Silvia Steininger.

Francesca Palmiotto is an Assistant Professor of Law at IE University, Madrid. Her research explores the intersection of law and technology, focusing on Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence, the Governance of New Technologies and Corporate Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Francesca earned her PhD in 2023 from the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Before joining IE University, Francesca was a postdoctoral researcher at Hertie School's Centre for Fundamanetal Rights and a member of the AFAR project research team. Francesca is also the co-founder and chief editor of “The Digital Constitutionalist” (DigiCon).

Silvia Steininger is postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Her research engages in interdisciplinary perspectives on international law and domestic, regional, and international courts, in particular in the area of human rights and economic law. Her PhD thesis on backlash and resilience of regional human rights courts was awarded the Werner Pünder Prize 2024 for the best thesis on freedom and authoritarianism at the University of Frankfurt in all disciplines. She is also a Member of the Board of the European Society of International Law.

This masterclass outlines ways in which interview techniques can be used to study legal processes related to the formation of legal institutions or doctrinal developments. Based on basic ideas derived from reflexive sociology of law, the class will introduce participants to interview methods for exploring how actors and constellations of actors influence the development of law and legal institutions. The class will draw on examples from studies of both international human rights courts and broader fields of human rights.

The masterclass is led by Prof. Mikael Rask Madsen.

Mikael Madsen is Professor of European Law and Integration at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen and Director and founder of iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts. Prof. Madsen has published widely on international law and institutions and his research has been recognized by a number of prizes, including the Elite Researcher Prize and the Carlsberg Research Prize.