Dauphine Legal Research

Founded in 2025, Dauphine Legal Research (DLR) is a research laboratory focusing on international and comparative business law and sustainable development law. It is staffed by research professors from Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, who are specialists in these disciplines and who collaborate with researchers from elsewhere.

Access to justice

This involves exploring developments in international litigation in terms of access to a judge. How does a litigant access international, state and arbitral justice in the current context ? What are the obstacles to gaining access to the justice system (costs, procedure, distances, timelines) ? Above all, how do we frame acces to the justice system in a world where the legal and judicial terms are shifting profoundly ?

These questions lead us to address certain very current themes such as group actions (European directive of 25 November, 2020, on representative actions and the French transposing act of 30 April, 2025), immunity of States and international organizations, which pose an obstacle to judicial power and give rise to abundant jurisprudence in France and abroad, and third-party litigation funding which came from Australia in the 1990s, and which today raises concerns due to its broad use in international litigation.

Companies facing deep changes

Although companies have always faced a number of risks, these particular risks have now become systemic and global.

How are companies encouraged to know and control their social and environmental risks ? Are they - or their leaders - likely to be sanctioned for inaction with respect to the climate? What pressures do they face when it comes to respect for human rights, lockdowns for health risks ? How can we urge them to better incorporate social and environmental challenges, such as climate, planetary limits and the fair sharing of value, into their core strategy ? Within the context of the current polycrisis, what is the role of law in the structuring of the power relations with which the company is dealing ?

Due to their global nature, these questions require a response based on the comparison of changes observed in various state laws (comparative law) and in the international sphere (international law). Furthermore, they present a significant economic, sociological and financial dimension that offers natural opportunities for interdisciplinary approaches within Université Paris Dauphine-PSL.