This event will feature presentations by Gaëtan Cliquennois (CNRS, University of Rennes and University of Strasbourg) and Scott Cummings (UCLA, School of Law).
Our research applies a legal and sociolegal methodology to determine and characterise the nature of conservative and right-wing movements and their claims, the tactics and objectives pursued by them in their litigation and other legal mobilisation activities, and the impacts of such mobilisation, including on the ECtHR. As these operations are typically hidden, studying them requires cross-referencing multiple sources and methodologies (legal and sociolegal methodologies regarding the judicial inputs, sociolegal methodology to the judicial outputs) to reveal whatever influence these right-wing organisations have on jurisprudence and judges, and the development of law more broadly. In this presentation, we will stress the main limits, opportunities and interests when undertaking and investigating right-wing legal mobilisation that is a sensitive issue. In particular, the main hindrances to the research are underlined: the limited access to all complaints submitted by right-wing movements and to interviews with some conservative actors; the opposition and weak collaboration of certain conservative NGOs through waffle; the potential pressure on the anonymisation of some data and the potential reaction from some conservatives to scientific publications.
Speakers:
Gaëtan Cliquennois works as permanent research fellow for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Rennes (IODE). He has been recently awarded an ERC advanced (JUST.PEN, 2025-2030) to work on the conservative and liberal mobilization at the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union in the field of abortion, euthanasia, counter-terrorism, prostitution, pornography, detention and hate speech and crime. He has notably published a book on liberal litigation in 2020 ( European Human Rights Justice and Privatisation: The Growing Influence of Foreign Private Funds ) with Cambridge University Press. He has also edited and published in several special issues in European Law Journal (in 2016), Law & Social Inquiry and in European Constitutional Law Review (both forthcoming).
Scott Cummings is Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice, and local government law. A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.