Benny Auner has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Public Law, University of Salzburg, since January 2023. Previously, he was a senior scientist at the Austrian Human Rights Institute, University of Salzburg, and worked as an associate focusing on family law. In addition to human rights law, his research interests include national constitutional law (in particular municipal constitutional law) and procedural law as well as environmental law. 

 Dr. Nufar Avni, urban planner and geographer, joined the department during the 2020 academic year. Nufar's research interests focus on justice and spatial equity in planning processes, urban regeneration, urban citizenship, planning in the global south and planning in contested cities. Her research combines methods, theories and concepts from urban planning, urban geography, gender studies and urban sociology. In her doctoral dissertation completed at the School of Urban Planning at McGill University, Canada (2018), Nufar explored issues of social and environmental justice in waterfront redevelopment projects in Washington, D.C and Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Nufar later researched issues of urban citizenship, divided communities and activism in East Jerusalem as part of a Marie Curie Horizon 2020 grant (2018-2020). In addition to her main research interests, Nufar is a member of the Horizon 2020 COST ACTION group on Placemaking and Digitization and an international research group exploring nationalism in cities. 

Nir Barak is a lecturer in the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University. His fields of research are urban politics, environmental politics, and political theory. His current research focuses on the relationship between national citizenship and urban citizenship (city-zenship) in light of the rising power of cities in international politics (e.g., supranational city-based networks) and growing instances of cities’ demand for more political autonomy vis-à-vis the state (e.g., regulations which challenge national laws).

Bartosz Biskup is a philosopher, lawyer, a secretary of Jagiellonian Center for Law, Language and Philosophy and a member of Collegium Invisibile. During his studies, he was mostly interested in the philosophy of language (pragmatic-semantic interferences and theory of speech acts) and its implementation to legal problems and interpretation. Now he conducts research in social philosophy and ontology. His PhD research concerns the concept of marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights [within Preludium BIS I Grant, NCN; PI: prof. Adam Dyrda]. Nevertheless, his analysis is not legal in the sense of studying provisions. It aims to explain the presuppositions behind the concept and how marriage can be philosophically described as a social institution. He tries to find whether such a concept may embrace non-conjugal European families, as structures that do not resemble a nuclear family are disadvantaged and discriminated in social life. See a Pop-Sci podcast episode concerning of his PhD [in Polish]. Simultaneously, he is a Principal Investigator of a project concerning the artifactual character of law (Preludium, NCN). The primary question is what additional, comparing to social ontology, conceptual or theoretical utility the artifact framework gives us in scrutinizing law. Another is the relation between the artifactuality of law and the social source thesis (as discussed within general jurisprudence). Finally, the project also aims to determine whether both legal positivism and anti-positivism may accept any of the senses of artifact identified in the project. The artifactual framework may help to elucidate a minimal, standpoint-neutral meaning of the concept of law. Bartosz Biskup is also an author of two pop-sci papers concerning marriage and lying [in Polish].

Chiara Cerbone is a postdoctoral research fellow in Comparative Public Law at the University of Parma, where she has been working since June 2023 within the Onfoods project. She collaborates with the Chair of Comparative Public Law held by Professor Lucia Scaffardi and is a member of the BRICS Research Group.

She earned her Master’s degree in Law with top marks (110/110) from the University of Naples “Federico II” in 2018, with a thesis on bicameralism in Italy and Spain supervised by Professor Salvatore Prisco. From 2018 to 2020, she collaborated with the Chair of Comparative Public Law at the same university.

In 2019, she attended the “Silvano Tosi” Parliamentary Studies Seminar, organized by the Association for Parliamentary Studies and Research and the University of Florence.

Since 2020, she has been enrolled in the second-level Master’s program “Mario Galizia” – Parliamentary Institutions for Assembly Consultants at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” receiving a merit-based admission scholarship as top-ranked candidate.

She is a member of DIPEC – the Research Group on European and Comparative Public Law at the University of Siena, collaborating with Professors Tania Groppi (DISAG) and Valeria Piergigli (DIGUR).

In March 2025, she obtained her PhD in Comparative Public Law from the University of Siena, in partnership with the University of Foggia and under an international co-tutelle agreement with UNED Madrid. Her dissertation, supervised by Professors Groppi and Vidal, focused on emergency powers in regional states, comparing Italy and Spain. She has conducted research stays at the Universidad de Oviedo, UNED in Madrid, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

She completed her legal traineeship with a focus on administrative litigation and interned at both the Civil Section VI of the Court of Naples and the Regional Council of Lazio.

Her research interests span comparative public law and constitutional law. She has particularly focused on the legal management of crises and emergencies, the right to food, regional law, the autonomy of subnational entities, and the relationship between central and peripheral levels of government. 

Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy, with a strong interest in Economics and the History of ideas. His main research interests lie in Political Philosophy (in particular, markets and democracy, value pluralism) and Philosophy of Economics (Decision theory, social choice, competitive markets). He is also interested in the history of these domains, more particularly the history of liberalism and neo-liberalism. In September 2022, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Political Philosophy at the ENS de Lyon in France: Governing with rules, political and legal neoliberal thinking, which focused on the contribution of Hayek, Lippmann, Buchanan, and Posner. This work was conducted partly at Duke University (Center for the History of Political Economy), where he stayed for one year. In this dissertation, he studied neoliberalism as a political theory mainly interested in the problem of the design of good rules to promote competitive markets.

During a postdoc in Fribourg after his Ph.D, he extended his the question of the recognition of complexity and value pluralism for contemporary societies. This led me him work on deliberative democracy as a way to cope with complexity and pluralism, and on polycentricity and federalism. He also partly work on topics related to behavioral economics.

Marc Goetzmann is a lecturer in the Law-Languages ​​department of the University of Tours. He holds a doctorate in philosophy of law and social sciences from the Université Côte d’Azur. He is the author with Guillaume Durieux of Le commun, Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2020 (www.didac-philo.com/livre/le-commun/) and editor-in-chief of Implications Philosophiques.

Raul Magni Berton est professeur de sciences politiques à l’Université Catholique de Lille (ESPOL), où il est directeur adjoint, et chercheur à ESPOL-LAB. Il soutient sa thèse à Paris 4 – Sorbonne en 2002 et obtient l’agrégation des universités en 2009. Il a enseigné à Paris, Montréal, Bordeaux et Grenoble, et, en tant que professeur invité, à Genève, Stuttgart et Turin. Spécialiste des régimes politiques comparés, il travaille en particulier sur les systèmes démocratiques, leur légitimité et leur capacité à se substituer à la violence. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur la démocratie directe et ses effets.

Nefeli Lefkopoulou is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, teaching “The Judge and the Expert”, “Comparative Judicial Politics” and “the Politics of Electoral Systems”. She is also teaching “Constitutional Law & Political Institutions” at the American University of Paris. She obtained her Ph.D. in Public Law from Sciences Po Paris. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on evidence in constitutional adjudication from a comparative perspective. She holds a M.A. in European Political and Administrative Studies from the College of Europe (Bruges), a Master 1 in Comparative Law from the University of Oxford and an LLB from the University of Paris II - Panthéon-Assas. In 2018, she was a visiting research fellow at the Càtedra de Cultura Jurídica at the University of Girona in Spain. During her doctoral research, she worked as an A.T.E.R. at the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne and taught European Union Law, Administrative Law, Constitutional Law at various Law Faculties in Paris. She has also worked as a Multimedia Journalist (Toute L’Europe.eu), as a Research Assistant (Trinity College Dublin), and as a Law Clerk (Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP).

Professor Renninger is a Global Professor of Practice, Law, at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Before joining Arizona, he held a Postdoc Mobility Fellowship and Visiting Scholarship at Harvard Law School, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In addition, he is affiliated with the Max Planck “Chinese Legal Tradition” Working Group and with Nanjing University’s Sino-German Law Institute as an Honorary Research Fellow. Professor Renninger’s first research focus lies on constitutional and administrative law, particularly federalism, individual rights, urban and local government, and environmental law. He has a second key interest in jurisprudence, exploring the foundations of law through the lens of legal theory, philosophy, history, and methodology. Throughout those research areas, Professor Renninger adopts a both domestic and global, comparative and international, perspective: In addition to English, he publishes in three foreign languages (German, Chinese, and Spanish); and in addition to the U.S., he has gained extensive expertise in and on Asia (China) as well as in and on Europe (EU, UK, Switzerland, and his native Germany). Professor Renninger holds a dual-degree PhD in law from the Universities of Freiburg and Lucerne. Previously, he read law as well as Chinese in Freiburg and Nanjing, graduating with the German First Exam in Law (JD equivalent). Professor Renninger has held visiting research and adjunct teaching appointments at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, NUS Singapore, the China University of Political Science and Law, and the Max Planck Institutes.

Oriane Roty is a PhD candidate in the ICD Department at the University of Tours, France. She is part of the Trust Issues Project, funded by the French Research Agency, which brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and their adaptation in French law. With a background in philosophy and law from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, her research focuses on the origins and evolution of these legal frameworks as a response to the housing crisis, analyzing them as products of their social, historical, and legal contexts.

Oskar Steiner is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE). Oskar obtained his Master’s degree from the Sciences Po Urban School in 2024, where he completed the master’s program Governing Ecological Transitions in Cities (GETIC) alongside a thesis in Sociology at the School of Research. Before moving to Paris he received a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Economics from the University of British Columbia, Canada (UBC), as well as a Bachelor’s in Economy and Society from Sciences Po’s Menton campus.

financed by the EU Commission, as part of the LAC-EU doctoral network. After living in Italy, the United States and Germany, he moved to England where he obtained a Bachelor's degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of Manchester and a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is also a Central America Researcher for ACLED (the Armed Conflict Location Event Database), and in the past he has collaborated with IARI (Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali), an Italian think-tank and geopolitical academy as Editor-in-chief of the Latin American Desk.

Maddalena Vivona is PhD student and Research Manager at the Faculty of Law of the University of Graz. Her research interests focuses on the prohibition of torture, political participation of third country nationals, human rights indicators, justice and human rights and human security.