Research methods in fundamental rights

This opening session will be led by Professors Başak Çalı and Cathryn Costello.

Başak Çalı is Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international human rights law, with a special interest in comparative human rights law. She has written extensively on the purpose, interpretation, legitimacy, standards of review and domestic impact of human rights law. Her work places human rights law in its broader normative and political context and has a dual interest in legal interpretation and law in action.

Cathryn Costello is a Visiting Professor at the Hertie School.  She is Full Professor of Global Refugee and Migration Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. She is an expert in European and international refugee and migration law and has written about EU asylum and migration law, international refugee law, and the relationship between migration and labour law. Cathryn is currently the Principal Investigator of RefMig, a five-year ERC-funded research project exploring refugee mobility, recognition and rights. She has also done studies for UNHCR, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford.

This masterclass will first explore the concept of a case study and how to design one, in particular how we select a single or a small number of comparative cases for intense examination from a universe of cases.  By case, we do not mean a decision by a court, but rather a delineated study of a practice or process.  We will review a range of logics developed in social sciences that help justify selecting cases and consider examples of case study research in human rights.  We will then turn to comparative method, in particular drawing on insights from comparative political science that have been applied in comparative constitutional and comparative international law, mainly in small ‘n’ studies.  We will explore the rationales of comparison, and what questions may be answered by comparative study. 

This masterclass is led jointly by Professors Başak Çalı and Cathryn Costello.

This masterclass is led jointly by Professor Cathryn Costello and Dr. Silvia Steininger.

Silvia Steininger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. Her research engages in interdisciplinary perspectives on international law and domestic, regional, and international courts, in particular in the area of human rights and economic law. Silvia lectured on human rights, public international law, and international dispute settlement at universities in Germany, France, and Denmark. Before joining Hertie School, she completed research stays at the Judicial Studies Institute at Masaryk University Brno, the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law, Hertie School’s Centre of Fundamental Rights, the European University Institute, the Department for the Execution of ECHR Judgments in Strasbourg, and iCourts, the Centre of Excellence for Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen.

This masterclass aims at introducing normativity in human rights research from a theoretical and methodological perspective. The lecture is three-fold. First, it will define 'normative' in relation/in contrast to other epistemologies, such as the 'doctrinal' or the 'empirical', and explain how each epistemology grounds a distinct methodology for researching (human rights) law. Second, the lecture will explore and exemplify the normative approach to human rights and locate where the 'normative' may intersect with, and benefit from, other epistemologies and their associated methods. Third, the lecture will engage with the lecturer's own research as well as the papers submitted by the participants as vantage points to further discuss and illustrate these definitions, distinctions, and locations.

This masterclass is led by Dr Alain Zysset, Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Law, University of Glasgow. From 2019 - 2020, Zysset was a visiting fellow at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. His research lies at the intersection of public law, international law and political theory and his main area of research is the theory and practice of the ECHR. Zysset is the author of The ECHR and Human Rights Theory (Routledge, 2016).

This mastercalss will explore process-tracing - a qualitative social science method used for unpacking causal relationships and examining processes of change. We will explore a number of questions such as: 1) different varieties of process-tracing methods; 2) their applicability to legal and human rights research; 3) the limitations of process-tracing; and 4) to what extent your own research projects involve causal relationships and how these processes might be observed and analysed. We will also consider some existing examples of applying process-tracing to human rights research.

The masterclas on process-tracing will be led by Professor Mark Dawson, Professor of European Law and Governance at the Hertie School. Prof. Dawson's research focuses on EU law and particularly on how EU law affects and is affected by European politics and policymaking. He recently co-wrote a textbook on this topic with Cambridge University Press (here). His work has been cited by leading courts such as the European Court of Justice (here) and German Constitutional Court (here). He is currently the co-editor of the series Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (here) and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Law Review.

This Masterclass outlines ways in which interview techniques can be used to study legal processes related to the formation of legal institutions or doctrinal developments. Based on basic ideas derived from reflexive sociology of law, the class will introduce participants to interview methods for exploring how actors and constellations of actors influence the development of law and legal institutions. The class will draw on examples from studies of both international human rights courts and broader fields of human rights.

The masterclass on 'Using interviews to study legal processes and fields' is led by Professor Mikael Rask Madsen, Professor of European Law and Integration at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen and Director and founder of iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts. Prof. Madsen has published widely on international law and institutions and his research has been recognized by a number of prizes, including the Elite Researcher Prize and the Carlsberg Research Prize.

Archival methods offer access to rich historical data as primary sources. The aim of this masterclass is to train researchers on both the practical dimension of how to gather data from archives as well as the analytical dimension of how to evaluate the data gathered. The class will explore how to identify archival materials that are relevant to your research, assess the means of access to these archives, undertake the actual process of data collection in archives, and evaluate the information correctly. We will draw upon examples of social science research that have used archives in their analyses and evaluate their merits and pitfalls. 

This masterclass is led by Professor Shubha Kamala Prasad, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School. Her research examines domestic sources of foreign policy, spanning substate conflict to diaspora mobilization. She was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (2020-22), Fiesole, Italy. Shubha was awarded her PhD in Political Science in 2020 from the Department of Government, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. Her prior work experience also includes organizing Track II Dialogues between India and Pakistan.

Quantitative studies using text-as-data and applying methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have become commonplace in both legal and social science research in the past decade. The aim of this masterclass is to provide an overview over recent developments from simple dictionary-based methods to the use of supervised machine learning or Large Language Models (LLMs) in studying legal, administrative, or political language related to fundamental rights at national and international level. At the end of this class, participants will understand how these methods and tools can be used to scale up qualitative research or researchers' expertise to work with large(r) amounts of textual data—independent of whether these data are based on interviews or archival research, on court cases or public speeches. No prior quantitative training is necessary to follow this class.

This masterclass is led by Dr. Ronny Patz, Project Manager and Postdoctoral Researcher at the MetaKLuB Project, Chair for Educational and Socialization Theory, at Potsdam University. Previously, he worked as Senior Lecturer and Adjunct at Hertie School (2020-23), where he taught "Human Rights and Global Governance" and other courses on international affairs. From 2014-20, Ronny worked as Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in a project of the DFG Research Unit “International Public Administration” at LMU Munich, where researched the bureaucracies of International Organisations (IOs) with a focus on IO financing. He has worked with quantiative text analysis studying the annual reports of UNHCR, IOM and UNRWA (1951-2020) and has co-published the large text corpus "The UN Security Council Debates" (1995-2020) as well as multiple studies using different NLP methods to analyze this corpus. Outside academia, Ronny Patz has worked at the Transparency International EU Office in Brussels and at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (German Permanent Representation) and in Chisinau (Moldova field office).

This masterclass is led by Professor Joseph Weiler, Radbruch-Kantorowicz Visiting Professor at the Hertie School and University Professor at NYU Law School, where he holds the European Union Jean Monnet Chair, and is Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In addition to being the director of the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at NYU, he is also Co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON). Among the many distinctions Professor Weiler has received is 2022's Ratzinger Prize, which was awarded by Pope Francis. Founded in 2011, the prize is considered the Nobel Prize for theology. It is awarded yearly to two scholars of any faith whose work has made significant contributions to theology.