Current Research Projects
Integrating Diversity in the European Union (InDivEU): This Horizon 2020 project on Differentiated Integration (DI) brings together a wide variety of scholars from various disciplines from 14 different universities and is housed in the RSCAS. I lead the Work package on Constitutional Standards of Democracy and Accountability and a final working paper will be completed by July 2021. The main research question of this paper can be formulated as follows: does DI strengthen or undermine constitutional standards of democracy and accountability?
Un-Owned Personal Data. Inter-operable EU Borders and Transitioning Rights: This multi-annual Research Council funded project is led together with Prof Andrew Geddes RSCAS, Migration Policy Centre and brings together a number of law and other researchers to investigate whether advanced technologies, inherent in interoperable information systems in the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), undermine the fundamental rights of third-country nationals, including asylum seekers. Our aim is to understand the scope of interoperability in the AFSJ in relation to transitioning rights, in order to design an integrated model of interoperable justice encompassing different layers of accountability and liability.
Data at the Boundaries of Law: Following my convening of and participation in the Specialized Courses during the 2019 Academy of European Law summer course on The Law of the European Union, I will edit and write in the forthcoming volume Data at the Boundaries of Law in the Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law series published by OUP. The volume will include contributions by the lecturers who participated in the summer course, and the following themes will be examined in detail: EU data-led security; data protection law; unowned data; data-driven law; algorithmic transparency.
Seeing Executive Technocracy in the EU: This new book length project seeks to explore the role of experts and scientific evidence across very different crisis situations at the level of supranational governance. Traditionally getting access to what happens inside technocracies and the role of experts in that context is a real challenge if not impossible. Nowadays, however, with EU transparency policies that evolve and strengthen, is it not possible to study empirically what happens inside the box of actual decision making and the lead up to it? Seeing transparency in action requires precisely a more empirical, socio-legal turn in terms of methods and European law and governance seem to offer us a key tool. It enables not only the public and experts to understand expert executive responsibilities and to scrutinize scientific assessment work and outputs , it also enables the assessment of the procedures from a normative perspective and the relationship in practice with the political executive.