VUB Contextual Research in Law

  Dr. Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín (SNSF/University of Vienna)   Architects of the Better Worod: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order, 1898-1998 Abstract Even before the US President Harry Truman famously urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance had already proven to be fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. In the collective imagination of both practitioners and scholars, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a structure with its own “architecture” that overlooks areas of governance sustained by normative pillars. And yet, international law’s castles were not built solely in the air. The metaphorical use of architectonical language in the existing literature only hides the discipline’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which internation...

While still somewhat niche, digital humanities (history) and empirical legal studies (law) have successfully established themselves as respectable fields of research. Yet, both Belgian law schools nor legal historians have picked up this trend. In this lecture, I explain how legal historical methods have evolved over the past decades and provide examples of how empirical methods may be applied in legal (historical) research. Although the concerns of lawyers are somewhat different  from legal historians, empirical or digital methods can be beneficial to both. The lecture is thus relevant for all researchers interested in empirical and digital methods. Florenz Volkaert   (°1995) studied law at Ghent University (2018, summa cum laude) and obtained an LL.M/MSc. in Law and Economics (2018-2019, receiving the award for best student in the program) from the Universität Hamburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research as part of an Erasmus...

    (image source:  Yale UP ) CORE and GRILI (UGent) co-organise an  online book launch  on dr. Nicholas Mulder's  The Economic Weapon , recently published by  Yale . Dr. Alexandra Hofer (Utrecht) will comment on the work after a presentation by the author.  The event takes place on  Thursday 17 March, 12:30-14:00 CEST . Details on registration can be found  here .