Within the Law and the Inner Self project, I am responsible for research concerning international, human rights and comparative constitutional law, notably concerning the UK and Germany. My recent work has delved extensively into the rights to freedom of thought and private life (including categories developed within this right by the European Court of Human Rights) as well as other personality rights (as understood in continental European civil law traditions) and their re-assessment in light of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, both within the European context and in comparison with international human rights law. My focus on European human rights law includes studies of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union, particularly on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, as well as the interaction of the legal regimes of the EU and international law.
Besides human rights law in international and regional frameworks, my core areas of expertise are European Union, African Union and public international law, self-determination of peoples (generally, I am interested in rights protecting either the collective or individual notion of the ‘self’); the effects of different forms of governance on human rights and their development through practice, scholarship and jurisprudence and vice versa; the laws and policies of international organisations; supranational and regional integration and legal processes; comparative law and legal history.
While mainly adopting the methodology of legal research, I like to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches in my research from neighbouring disciplines, such as history, philosophy, sociology and other disciplines in the humanities. One of my personal concerns is to emphasise approaches from legal frameworks that are underrepresented in European mainstream research literature.
Felicitas Benziger 