How Do Legal Spaces Influence Each Other?

WZB researcher Dana Burchardt has been a Heisenberg Fellow since September 2025. She is pursuing a research project entitled “Interacting Legal Spaces” in which she analyses how different international, regional, national and transnational legal spaces interrelate. The Heisenberg Fellowship is funded by the German Research Foundation.

The first part of the project analyses an important substantive aspect of the interactions that take place between legal spaces at the international, regional and transnational levels: transnational procedural requirements. These are fair trial standards established by the institutions of one legal space vis-à-vis another legal space. They include, inter alia, procedural human rights protections with regard to international organisations and their institutions, hybrid institutions such as the Meta Oversight Board or the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and requirements vis-à-vis national courts. Procedural requirements are transnational if, for example, they are issued by a national or regional court vis-à-vis an international organisation or by one national legal system vis-à-vis another. This is often necessary because of existing rule of law deficits in the respective legal space.

The second part of the project analyses the interactions of legal spaces on a more general level. It puts a focus on interdisciplinary studies of these interactions to generate new insights regarding interacting legal spaces and to strengthen the disciplinary dialogue in this research field.

The third part of the project focuses on individual relationships between two legal spaces and analyses these in detail. This includes, inter alia, the interactions between national law and the law of regional integration organisations in Africa and Europe; the relationship between hybrid transnational legal spaces such as ‘platform law’ and ‘lex sportiva’ with other legal spaces; and the influence of digitalisation on the relationship between legal spaces, particularly in the European context.

2/2/26, kes/DB