Externally Funded Projects

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.

Collaborators: Lilian Moncrieff (PI), Neil Georgeson, Bruce Ross.  

In the Company of Dada: Countering 'Business as Usual' in the Era of Climate Change is a law-arts collaboration. It goes looking for dada through the streets, galleries and law-giving sites of three cities in Europe (Zurich, Paris and Berlin) for the remnants of the unconventional art movement that arose in negative reaction to the first world war, over 100 years ago. We follow the collaborators as they look around the three cities for elusive hints at the lasting meaning of dada, after dada sought to counter (in prefigurative art, parody and performance) a dangerous conventionalism, which once again has the planet in its grip - another case of ‘business as usual’. Contractual aspirations are traced, constitutional manifestos read (out loud), and the meandering journeys of the sometimes exhausted (physically, spiritually) participants of dada are mapped and grafted onto sources, historical and contemporary, which unmask corporakratia (ie, the power of corporates and economic convention over the public good).

The collaboration will present a (multimedia) paper at the Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago in Spring 2025, and has plans for a performance.

Image: Jean Arp (artist)
Link to image on Digital Collections
Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ("CCO 1.0 Dedication")

In 2024-25 Eva Nanopoulos will be working on a new book project, A Decolonial Legal History of Sanctions, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. What are known as ‘economic sanctions’ are generally treated as coercive but ultimately ‘peaceful’ (i.e., non-violent) instruments by international law. As a result, sanctions are frequently deployed by states and other international actors during ‘peace-time’ to pursue a variety of objectives. Yet, the legal concept and practice of ‘peaceful sanctions’ is ridden with contradictions. Prior to the twentieth century, international law viewed sanctions as a violent form of warfare that is illegal outside active hostilities. Conceptually, they conflict with the dominant liberal ideology that only the free market and economic freedom can deliver peace. And in practice, many sanctions are cast in official legal and political discourse as instances of aggression or economic warfare. The project’s premise is that understanding the legal evolution and contemporary status of sanctions requires such contradictions to be taken seriously as symptoms of the entangled histories of international law, capitalism, and imperialism.

Against this background, the project will be the first a) to historicise and theorise the emergence ‘economic’ coercion as an independence source of violence that no longer relies exclusively on military force; b) to draw the connections between the history of sanctions under international law and the histories of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism; c) to understand the role of international law in enabling and legitimising new forms of non-armed imperial violence.

Full project title: How should a connection between Jewish identity and affinity with Israel be treated by anti-discrimination law

Surveys show that more than 90% of British Jews feel the State of Israel plays a significant role in their Jewish identity. This project, led by Dr Matthew Bolton and funded by UK Research and Innovation via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship programme, explores how this connection is treated in UK anti-discrimination law. It responds to a number of legal judgements regarding claims of Israel-related anti-Jewish discrimination which have come to radically opposed conclusions, and which have led to confusion about the protection Jewish people can expect from equality law. Combining qualitative doctrinal legal research and political philosophy methodologies, the project will seek to bring clarity to this issue by:

• showing how distinct, and at times incommensurable, conceptions of Jewish affinity with Israel are active in this dispute;
• examining whether the formal structure of anti-discrimination law, based on a set of “protected characteristics”, limits its understanding of Jewish affinity with Israel to that of a voluntarist political commitment, and whether this hinders recognition of why Jewish people may feel harassed due to an attachment to Israel, in a way that goes beyond political disagreement;
• exploring the historical origins and contemporary significance of a “politically existential” relation between modern Jewish identity and Israel. Here the existence of a sovereign state of Israel is understood to provide a vital guarantee of protections for Jewish people in the wake of the failure of universalist models during the Holocaust;
• considering whether the structural limitation of anti-discrimination law contributes to anti-Jewish discrimination by framing political existential conceptions as deceptively disguised voluntarist political commitments. 

The project intends to examine whether the Jewish Chronicle and The Telegraph, which spearhead many unfounded antisemitism accusations (conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel) are discriminatory because they disproportionately target women of colour.

Reproductive Borders and Bordering Reproduction (RBBR): Access to Care for Women from Ethnic Minority and Migrant Groups delves into the intricate web of institutional, racial, and legal discrimination that creates formidable barriers to equitable reproductive and maternal healthcare. By pioneering an innovative interdisciplinary approach that fosters dynamic dialogue among diverse stakeholders, sites, and timelines, the research project endeavours to yield practical, policy, and academic insights into the profound impact of medical and legal structures in impeding access to essential healthcare. Furthermore, the project aims to explore the resilience and agency of women and medical professionals in navigating these structures.

The research project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and led by Dr Camillia Kong at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Bristol University, Kings College London, and the University of Sussex.

Find out more about the Reproductive Borders and Bordering Reproduction project.

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).

This project is led by Dr David Scott and funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Over the past two decades, international lawyers have talked increasingly in terms of time: be it in the discipline’s turn to history, its work to periodise our present ‘era’ or ‘age’, or its attempts to predict the ‘future’ of international law. Utilising an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from German historian Reinhart Koselleck, his research investigates international law’s ‘turn to time’ along two lines: first, as sets of temporal relations that international legal scholars draw between the past, present, and future, in order to produce different interventions in contemporary international legal debates; and second, as an expression of particular beliefs about the present – what makes this moment one that requires temporal thinking. Dr Scott's research explores how and why international lawyers have used time to make arguments about contemporary international law, in order to critically illuminate time as a space of contestation within international legal thought that is ripe for further study.

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.