iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen seeks applications for fully funded PhD scholarships. Applications are due 28 January 2016. Successful candidates will begin as early as 1 July 2016. The PhD fellowship lasts three years.

iCourts is a well-established Centre of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. Its research focus is on the ever-growing role of international courts, their place in a globalizing legal order and their impact on politics and society at large. To understand these crucial and contemporary interplays of law, politics and society, iCourts has launched a set of integrated interdisciplinary research projects on the causes and consequences of the proliferation of international courts. In particular, the research agenda of iCourts explores the processes of institutionalization, autonomization and legitimation of international courts. By bringing together a transnational group of top scholars with a background in law and social sciences, iCourts encourages interdisciplinary exchanges, and promotes empirical research of new and well-established international courts.

Applicants are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the research interests of iCourts, by consulting iCourt’s website http://jura.ku.dk/icourts/

Potential PhD projects:

For this call, iCourts particularly welcomes research projects that deal with:

-Comparative analysis of the embeddedness of international courts in different political and social systems, considering the perceived legitimacy and/or the legal and political conflicts faced by international courts in different national systems;

-Comparative analysis of the impact of regional international courts on regional integration processes, especially in less explored settings in Africa and Latin America;

-The interaction between regional courts with jurisdiction over either human rights, or economic matters in settings with overlapping regional and international legal regimes;

-The interaction between regional courts and the highest courts of contracting parties and/or global courts such as the ICJ, ICC, and WTO Appellate Body;

-The transformations of global governance and the role that international courts play in constitutionalizing legal regimes, examined via an empirical and/or theoretical analysis of the organization of public authority in pluralist/federal/hierarchical/non-hierarchical settings.
For more information, visit http://employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=789355.