International Hub of Excellence for Legal Cultural and Comparative Legal Studies

Acknowledging the crucial role of globalization and internationalization is an important precondition for solving the major societal challenges we face today. Sustainable solutions for the green shift, cybercrime, international conflict management, resource management, and immigration must be developed with due consideration of international law. In a time of increased international cooperation, a greater understanding of crucial similarities and differences between the ideas of and expectations to law in different countries requires that Norwegian law is analysed in comparison with the other legal cultures in Scandinavia and Europe. 

The Research Group for Legal Culture, Legal History and Comparative Law will expand its international network within comparative legal research with the aim to establish Bergen as an internationally recognised hub in the field. The network will develop interdisciplinary curiosity-driven research to examine and explain the relationships between law in Norway and other countries as well as international and supranational law. Specifically, the research group will develop a research project about legal realism as the regulatory foundations of Norwegian and Scandinavian Law, which will examine legal realism as the predominant ideology of law in the Scandinavian countries. We will also offer a national PhD course in comparative research methods, based on analytical models and teaching materials developed in Bergen.

Activities

By inviting experts to events, gathering knowledge and skills, and disseminating these nationally and internationally, we aim to achieve academic development as well as intellectual and methodological renewal. Central to the academic development of the research environment is the work on a concrete research project entitled “Legal realism as a regulatory foundation for Norwegian and Scandinavian law.” The goal is to develop an application for a project funded by the Research Council of Norway (NFR).

During the project’s start-up phase (2023–24), national and international experts will be brought together in two seminars to help sharpen the research questions, develop a clear research design, and establish an appropriate methodology for evaluating and comparing the effects of legal realist thinking on regulatory challenges in relation to three specific societal issues: the green transition, international conflict management, and human dignity at the end of life. The research group’s network will form the basis for recruiting experts who ensure the quality of the application process and anchor the project internationally and across disciplines (sociology, legal history, legal theory, and comparative law).

In the second phase (2025–26), we will test the research design and fine-tune methodological models and tools. Preliminary findings will be presented at a methodology workshop and an international conference. Experts’ contributions to the workshop will be developed into scholarly articles, while contributions to the conference will be published in an anthology with a gold-standard publisher (open access).

The project’s third phase, the final phase (2026–27), will be dedicated to preparing an application to the Research Council of Norway. Selected international experts will provide input on the drafting of the application text through two workshops. Linguistic precision, research questions, research design, and dissemination will be tested by independent peer reviewers.