Main research areas
At the Faculty of Law, we deal with legal topics and issues related to current challenges for our community within various research specialisations.
Main research areas
The Faculty of Law conducts research on a wide range of legal topics and issues in a large number of individual projects as well as in overarching networks. In addition to the consistent inclusion of international references, a key feature of our research is the openness and connectivity for exchange with academics from other disciplines.
Together, we want to make a contribution to overcoming the pressing challenges facing our community. In doing so, we have developed certain research foci, which we would like to briefly present below/here:
The topics
- Digitisation
Digitalisation is pushing the current legal framework to its institutional limits. Examples include autonomous vehicles, smart products and the automation of court proceedings. Our faculty(RiT) researches the effects of digitalisation on the law (digital court proceedings, legal tech solutions) and vice versa (regulation of AI, allocation of responsibility and liability).
The objectives of our research are the evaluation of effective allocation of responsibility in the use of automated systems (especially AI), the optimisation of the legal framework with regard to sustainability and the control of consumer decisions, and the harnessing of the benefits of digitalisation in legal proceedings and automated decisions.
Research into autonomous driving, which has been underway since the early days of vehicle automation (around 2015), is currently being researched internationally in dialogue with high-growth economies. Together with iTIME, the legal framework for smart products is being evaluated from a sustainability perspective and the impact of regulatory limits (approval and liability) on the market launch of innovations and their optimisation is being researched (so-called real laboratories).
We support the regulation of the digitalisation of court proceedings and develop legal tech solutions ourselves, e.g. for the legally secure processing of research data(CRC 1646).
Attention is also being paid to the question of how digitalisation tools can shape legal working environments. Central to this is the use of language models with corresponding chat components, also in the context of database research. In addition, accompanying research will evaluate the extent to which fully digital examination environments, including AI correction, can and should be realised. In cooperation with the Zentrale Anlaufstelle Barrierefrei, the aim is to use the potential of digitalisation to create barrier-free environments. With this in mind, the digital Bielefeld Accessible Law Collection was developed.
Our offer on "Digitalisation and Law" for students can be found, among other things, in focus area 9 as well as in corresponding excursions and in the conception and creation of new didactic concepts.
- Sustainability, governance & compliance management
This research focus deals with the legal implications of the increasing consideration of sustainability aspects in politics and business. Exciting questions about the future arise at the interfaces of environmental, commercial and technical law, and professors from the Faculty of Law conduct research on these issues.
The focus is on the contributions that law and jurisprudence can make to the ecologically, socially and economically sustainable development of our community. Specific topics and issues such as the regulation of financial instruments, the expansion of renewable energies and the reporting obligation for sustainability reports are used to illustrate the growing importance of legal governance for sustainable economic activity. Particular attention is paid to the challenges that this transformation process poses, especially for medium-sized (family) companies. The long-term orientation of companies is also analysed in connection with foundations and companies with tied assets.
Research activities on compliance management, which are also strongly anchored at the Faculty of Law, are closely linked to the topics of sustainability and governance. One focus of this work is on the importance of compliance management for healthcare organisations.
- Living
Providing the population with affordable housing is commonly referred to as the new social issue. The research focus on housing is dedicated to the interdisciplinary scientific examination of questions and problems relating to housing and does not ignore international references. The focus is on the legal aspects of renting and home ownership. The links between these areas of law and construction law, procedural law, insolvency law and the law on loan collateral are taken into account.
The increasing digitalisation of housing supply is a focal point of interdisciplinary research within this focus area, with both legal and architectural aspects playing a major role. Finally, the members of the research focus area combine their interests with disciplines whose relationship to housing only becomes apparent at second glance. One example of this is the project "Housing in Literature", which involves an unusual collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies and explores the historical references to housing.
