Research Methods in Fundamental Rights

This opening session will be led by Professor Başak Çalı. Basak is Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and 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 workshop on comparative doctrinal research methods will be led by Professor Cathryn Costello. She is  an expert in European and international refugee and migration law and has written about EU asylum and migration law, international refugee law, and the relationship between migration and labour law. In July 2020 she will take up the Professorship of Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School and, with Professor Başak Çalı, be Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights. Cathryn is currently Professor of Refugee and Migration Law at the University of Oxford and the Principal Investigator of RefMig, an ERC-funded research project exploring refugee mobility, recognition and rights. She has also done studies for UNHCR, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament.

This workshop on normative research methods will be led by Dr. Alain Zysset. He is a Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Law, University of Glasgow and a Visiting Fellow at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental rights for a project on the European Court of Human Rights and populism financed by a Re-Constitution Fellowship. His research lies at the intersection of public law, international law and political theory and his main area of research is the theory and practice of the ECHR. Alain is the author of The ECHR and Human Rights Theory (Routledge, 2016).

This workshop on process-tracing methods will be led by Professor Mark Dawson. He is Professor of European Law and Governance at the Hertie School. His research focuses on the relationship between law and policymaking in the EU, particularly economic governance and human rights protection. He is the Principle Investigator of LEVIATHAN, a research project exploring the legal and political accountability structure of EU economic governance. LEVIATHAN is supported by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council.

This workshop on socio-legal research methods will be led by Dr. Dilek Kurban. She is a human rights lawyer conducting socio-legal and doctrinal research on supranational courts, the European Court of Human Rights, legal mobilisation and state violence. Her regional specialisation is Turkey. Her upcoming book titled Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge University Press, October 2020) employs the respective top-down and bottom-up approaches of judicial impact and legal mobilisation scholarships in inquiring the possibilities and limitations of effective supranational judicial oversight of authoritarian regimes engaged in gross violations against minorities. She has nearly fifteen years of field research experience.