Externally Funded Projects

The Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling funds empirical policy research by Leon Y. Xiao looking into whether legal and industry self-regulatory measures intended to reduce the potential harms of gambling-like video game loot boxes have been effective. Leon found that many companies did not comply with the Belgian Gaming Commission’s ‘ban’ of loot boxes. This finding has been reported in popular media, including NME (New Musical Express) and GamesIndustry.biz. The Belgian Minister of Justice has accepted the results, and companies have reportedly consequently taken compliance action. The study was also referenced in the House of Lords by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to argue in favour of the current UK regulatory approach. A further study in China is underway. To conduct fieldwork, Leon visited the Belgian Gam(e)(a)ble project.

The Cloud Legal Project (CLP) undertakes research in complex areas of law and regulation that are essential to the successful development and use of cloud computing services. CLP was launched in 2009 by members of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary University of London with generous financial support from Microsoft Corporation. The project is led by Christopher Millard, Professor of Privacy and Information Law at Queen Mary.

Since 2014, they have also been collaborating with the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge as part of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre.

This Project, administered by Queen Mary University of London Centre for Commercial Law Studies, is funded by the ESRC under the Macro-Economic Finance Hub of 'Rebuilding Macroeconomics,' a large collaborative Project at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

The research group comprised of Principal Investigator Professor Rosa Lastra (Sir John Lubbock Chair in Banking Law, Queen Mary) and Co-Investigators Dr Jason Grant Allen (Senior Fellow, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society), Dr David Andolfatto (Senior Vice President, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank), Mr Simon Gleeson (Partner, Clifford Chance), Dr Michael Kumhof (Senior Research Advisor, Bank of England), and Professor Saule T. Omarova (Beth & Marc Goldberg Professor of Law, Cornell University).

A joint seminar with the IMF held on 3-4 December 2020 discusses the results of the project. The IMF Working Paper, “Legal Aspects of Central Bank Digital Currency: Central Bank and Monetary Law Considerations”, is the first publication that focuses on the central bank and monetary law aspects of CBDC. It concludes that most central bank laws will require amendments to authorize the issuance of CBDC and questions whether CBDC can be legally labelled as currency. The Working Paper, “Central Bank Money: Liability, Asset, or Equity of the Nation?”, challenges the conventional accounting and economic treatment of central bank money and concludes that it is not a liability of the central bank.

This project is concerned with the impact of technological changes on trade governance. Multilateral trade rules were originally designed to facilitate trade in goods in the 1940s and last updated to cover trade in services in the early 1990s.

New digital technologies are changing the means for trading, the content of trade and the traders themselves. Data localisation measures and internet access restrictions are replacing tariffs and quotas as the new barriers to trade. The aim of the project is to assess the extent to which current trade rules are suitable for securing an open and non-discriminatory, but also safe and trustworthy digital market.

A combination of desk research, qualitative interviews with relevant stakeholders and doctrinal analysis of relevant literature on trade governance, will be used to (a) identify policy measures affecting digital trade; (b) compare rules for digital trade included in recent Trade Agreements; and (c) find international rules and standards other than trade rules relevant for the governance of digital trade.

The project is led by Dr Gabriel Gari and will be undertaken with the support of the UK Department of International Trade, Queen Mary’s CASE partner for this project, giving the researcher access to a wealth of knowledge and practical experience on the negotiation of trade rules for the digital economy.

Maksymilian Del Mar, Professor of Legal Theory and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, has been awarded a prestigious 12-month British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. The Fellowship will allow Professor Del Mar to complete a monograph entitled Neil MacCormick: A Scottish Jurisprudence for Stanford University Press.

The project examines the scholarship and political life of one of the twentieth’s century’s most distinguished jurists: Professor Sir Neil MacCormick (1941-2009). Supported also by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, as well as funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the long-standing project has involved examining the relationship between MacCormick’s extensive philosophical oeuvre and his political involvement, both in the Scottish National Party and in the European Parliament.

The project is accompanied by a website.

Dr Ruth Fletcher has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a project called ‘Ordering Time: periodic abortion law, gestational labour and reproductive justice’.

Ordering Time notices how time limits have come to play a key role in managing the terms on which reproductive labour may become free, and wonders what the time limits of abortion law could tell us about reproducing law otherwise.  Building on Fletcher’s existing work, the project asks what Ireland’s 2018 move to a periodic abortion law, with its 12 week time limit for abortion’s lawfulness and exceptional grounds-based access thereafter, has to contribute to knowledge of the gestational time limit as a global legal form that values reproductive labour in particular ways. Ordering Time aims to develop 1) critical analysis of time as a multi-dimensional category of reproductive justice, 2) witnessing with ‘time-utensils’ as a collection of methods for (re)working legal orders, and 3) an account of abortion law as a site of timely social reproduction.

'PROTECT The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization?' is funded by the European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework program. The research project studies the impact of the UN’s Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration on refugees’ right to international protection.

The vision of PROTECT is to discover ways of advancing the international protection system within today’s turbulent political context.

PROTECT consists of 11 partner universities in Europe, Canada, and South Africa.

Professor Elspeth Guild is part of the Steering Committee for this project.

Find out more about the project and their activites on the PROTECT website.

Dr Hedi Viterbo has been awarded a 2-year Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), for a research project titled ‘Rethinking Child Law and Policy.’

The aim of this project is to radically challenge, and offer alternatives to, the underlying assumptions of contemporary laws and policies concerning children. This research examines the blind spots of these principles and the harm they have done, often with the best of intentions, to people of all ages. This is done by integrating previously separate studies across different disciplines and applying their insights to key cases from international law and four countries: the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia.

This work also draws on insights from Dr Viterbo’s previous research, including his book, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Professor Duncan Matthews has been selected for £100,000 funding from the British Academy to support ground-breaking work on the role of intellectual property (IP) in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing and supply. 

The project 'Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for IP Licensing Practices in Vaccine Production' will draw lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic by analysing the role of IP licensing practices in the production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines, with a particular focus on patents, know-how, trade secrets and regulatory data.

By examining the impact of these practices on vaccine production and supply, the research aims to contribute positively to the ongoing policy debate about pandemic preparedness and response, both at the G7 and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The project focuses on recent rapid developments in IT infrastructure, which are supporting the wider use of cloud technology in a range of Earth Observation (EO) data exploitation projects. However, the future success of cloud-based processing approach to EO data analysis will depend on the ability to ensure the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) underlying proprietary methods and services built on the platforms’ capabilities.

The project aims to analyse and resolve the outstanding challenges related to IPRs protection in cloud-based EO data exploitation architectures and involves both legal and technical analysis including exploration of innovative concepts on the intersection of copyrights protection and blockchain technology.

The Queen Mary Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) research team comprises of Dr Noam Shemtov, Reader in IP and Technology Law, Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law and Head of CCLS, and Dr Michaela McDonald, Teaching Fellow.

(Image courtesy ESA Copernicus Sentinel 2)

Professor Shazia Choudhry and Dr Philippa Williams, (PI; Queen Mary School of Geography), were awarded just over £280,000 by the British Academy for a project (2019-2022) researching domestic violence in India. Despite legal initiatives over the last fifteen years, India has seen little progress in domestic violence, and victims often turn to informal, non-legal strategies and networks in order to cope, build resilience, and seek justice. The project, “Surviving Violence: Everyday Resilience and Gender Justice in Rural-Urban India”, addresses the gap between law, policy, and access to both support services and justice for domestic abuse victims. It seeks to critically examine how victims access legal and non-legal services across a continuum of rural-urban sites, enhancing empirical knowledge and informing evidence-based policy. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on expertise from Law, Political Science, Geography, and Anthropology, and employs participatory feminist methodology that emphasises women’s experiences and narratives of domestic violence, as well as their articulations of rights and justice.

The project is expected to advance conceptual knowledge regarding domestic violence while developing feminist-legal methodology. The project is also highly collaborative, drawing on existing civil society-academic partnerships across 3 key states. In addition to the Queen Mary team, the India-UK team involves partners including IIT Mumbai, New Delhi and Swarna Rajagopalan, Chennai.

The Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) received an award from the joint Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) Good Governance Fund (GGF) to deliver a project of technical assistance to support the establishment and operation of the new High IP Court of Ukraine (IP Court). The Project is part of a broader programme of the UK government to implement judicial reform in Ukraine. The Project started on the 1 March 2018 and will run for two and a half years with a total budget in excess of £850,000.

The goal of the Project is to support the creation and operation of a successful and effective IP Court in Ukraine, in order to make a significant contribution to improved levels of business confidence, more attractive investment conditions and a commercial environment that incentivises innovation and creativity, stimulating economic growth and prosperity.

The project is directed by Professor Ioannis Kokkoris, Chair in Law and Economics, and Dr Noam Shemtov, Reader in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at Queen Mary. Maria Tymofienko is Project Manager and Olga Gurgula is the Research Coordinator.

Professor Nicola Piper is Co-Investigator on a project led by Coventry University and funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Migration between the countries of the Global South, otherwise known as South-South migration, accounts for nearly half of all international migration, nearly 70% in some places. The potential of South-South migration to contribute to development and delivery of the SDGs is widely acknowledged but remains unrealised, largely due to existing inequalities at the global, national and local levels which determine who is (and is not) able to migrate, where to, and under which terms and conditions. These multidimensional inequalities are associated with a lack of rights for migrants and their families; difficult, expensive and sometimes dangerous journeys; and limited opportunities to access services and protection, which can, in turn, exacerbate inequalities.

Find out more about the GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub.

ESRC (LISS DTP postdoctoral Fellowship) has funded this project lead by Dr Angela Sherwood (mentored by Professor Neve Gordon).

For several decades now, international humanitarian organisations have been evidenced to commit social harms that reinforce forms of structural violence and inevitably generate egregious human rights violations. Often, these harms occur in the context of humanitarian interactions with states and their agents, but increasingly, they are also motivated by the competitive dynamics of the humanitarian marketplace. While this may be the case, the everyday harms committed by humanitarian actors are often dismissed as singular and unintentional events, and are rarely interrogated from criminological perspectives relating to crime, deviance, and institutional violence.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in post-earthquake Haiti, the project examines the responsibilities of state and non-state actors for housing-related harms in Haiti and engages with inter-disciplinary conversations about criminal labelling and non-penal ways of sanctioning state/humanitarian crime. In doing so, the project offers ways of branding deviant organisational acts as criminal. Academic articles, policy briefs, and workshops will be used to disseminate the project’s research findings to academic and non-academic audiences.

Find out more about the Understanding Humanitarian Crime project.

Dr Camillia Kong is a Co-Investigator on the Voicing Loss: Meanings and implications of participation by bereaved people in inquests project that is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and explores bereaved family members' understandings, expectations and experiences of coroners' investigations and inquests, and the legal and policy framework within which coroners' courts operate. Close family of the deceased can attend an inquest as 'interested persons’ which grants them certain rights, including the right to question witnesses and to ask to see evidence in advance of the inquest hearing. However, existing research evidence suggests that, in practice, bereaved people have an uncertain and ambiguous role and status in the inquest, and receive highly variable treatment. This is despite an explicit policy commitment to place bereaved families 'at the heart of' the coronial process – described as the ‘main aim’ of the coronial reforms encompassed by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.

The interdisciplinary project utilises legal, empirical, and philosophical analyses to interrogate the apparent gap between policy goals and practical realities, particularly in relation to what it means for bereaved people to be 'at the heart of' inquest proceedings.  The Principal Investigator of the project is Professor Jessica Jacobson of the Institute for Crime & Policy Research (ICPR) of Birkbeck College. The project involves the expertise and partnership of other colleagues at ICPR as well as the Centre for Death & Society (CDAS) at the University of Bath.

Examining the societal impact of AI and whether human rights can respond.

Governments around the world are using AI to help make important decisions that affect us all. This data-driven approach can offer key benefits, but it also relies on the ever-increasing collection of data on all aspects of our personal and public lives, representing a step change in the information the state holds on us, and a transformation in how that information is used.

This project look at the unintended consequences associated with this surveillance – the impact on how individuals develop their identity and how democratic society flourishes. Will a chilling effect emerge that changes individual behaviour? And what might the impact of this be? Will the knowledge that our activities are tracked and then translated into government decisions affect how we, for example, explore sexual identity or develop political opinions? Will we all be pushed towards the status quo in fear of the consequences of standing out? Ultimately the project seeks to examine what the effect of this will be on the well-being of our democracy.

This interdisciplinary project is led by Daragh Murray and funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.