Profile
Profile
The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris is a hub for leading-edge teaching and research that crosses traditional boundaries between law, the humanities and the social sciences. It holds a distinctive position within the national and international academic landscape as a vibrant site for critical and creative thinking.
The institute’s main priorities are to:
- provide a rallying point for inter- and transdisciplinary work on the foundations of law and justice
- foster intellectual and methodological innovation in teaching and research
- promote the training of postgraduate and early career researchers in interdisciplinary legal studies
- stimulate collaborative activities with national and international partners
To borrow a distinction from the late legal historian Marie Theres Fögen, the institute has long seen its role as more that of ‘troublemaker’ than ‘troubleshooter’. A consistent priority has been to undertake work that critiques and unsettles accepted categories and concepts, norms and discourses, practices and methods. This impulse continues to shape the identity of the institute today. Faced with the urgency of our present moment, however, we also turn our attentions increasingly to the future – to pursuing new forms of future-oriented critical thinking; to imagining future alternatives or alternative futures; to asking not just what is happening now, but what happens next.
