MUR Department of Excellence 2023-2027
DSG identified as a Department of Excellence for the five-year periods 2018-2022 and 2023-2027
What is a Department of Excellence
Departments of Excellence are identified and financed by MUR every five years as the best 180 departments of State universities. These departments stand out for the quality of the research produced and the quality of the development project submitted.
Law in Transition: excellence of the Department of Legal Studies, 2023-2027
The global scenario is characterised by transition, by changes in every sphere: progressive digitalisation involving collective and institutional interaction; growing dependence in decision-making and operational contexts on increasingly less transparent forms of artificial intelligence; a climate change of epochal proportions that makes it necessary to rethink development models.
To these major evolutions that have marked the global context over the past decade, two largely unforeseeable and traumatic events have been added in recent years, that are fundamentally changing collective strategic priorities and individual risk perceptions: the global pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The illusion of global peace fuelled by a globalised economic system having essentially vanished, whereas the prospect of a society of systematic risk characterised by continuous evolution seems to be becoming more and more concrete and requires radically new solutions.
Inevitably, these challenges are having a profound impact on the legal sphere, the core nerve centre of social organisation. The law must mirror these tensions and cannot renounce the aim of governing them. Thus we are witnessing a transition also in the field of legal studies, which is faced with the need to apply traditional concepts to new contexts, but also to review its underlying conceptual structures and methodological paradigms.
The role of the jurist in the management of change is thus evolving. We need to recover the idea of law as a form of social engineering and show that the jurist's expertise encompasses not only the knowledge of legal texts, but also of solutions that can interface with proposals from other disciplines.
As part of the 2018-2022 Project of Excellence, the Department set out to train global jurists through an evolutionary study of the system of sources. What we propose to do now will give the previous objective greater scope and will make it more systematic. In this Project, the global dimension embraces a broader horizon of meaning: global jurists are such insofar as interdisciplinary figures who can move with ease within evolutionary processes.
The Department of Legal Sciences intends to focus its teaching, research and third mission over the next 5 years on this evolution, observing the phenomenon from the point of view of three themes: digital transition, climate change and social change. The planned infrastructure and personnel investments will ensure the sustainability of the project activities.