Pothier Centre for Legal Research

The Pothier Centre for Legal Research at the University of Orléans is a research unit (UR 1212: private law and criminal sciences, international law, public law, legal history) that brings together around a hundred lecturer-researchers on major issues of contemporary law. A multidisciplinary research laboratory, it is mainly made up of lawyers from three different sections of the C.N.U. (National Council of Universities), which are private and public lawyers and legal historians, joined by sociologists and managers. The Pothier Centre for Legal Research, with its current name, was created in 1998 from the former Institute of Economic and Business Law, created in 1976 on the initiative of the Dean, Elie Alfandari. The change of name was motivated by the desire to broaden the scope of research beyond law and economics.  This multidisciplinarity, which is the laboratory's strength today, was further strengthened in 2014, following the merger with the Public Authorities Laboratory, which came from the old Local Authority laboratory, created in 1976. This allows better synergy between the research teams in Orléans in the fields of private and public law, legal history, public management and sociology.

Research Topics (Collective cross-disciplinary topics):

Changes in the sources of law, standards and normativity
The ‘Changes in the sources of law, standards and normativity’ theme examines the profound changes in legal standards and, more broadly, in social standards in our hyper-regulated societies. The aim is to identify, observe, diagnose, analyse and rethink these changes, and to recast our representations of law and normativity in the light of our own work and that of the great intellectuals of our time.

Heritage(s)
The ‘Heritage(s)’ theme brings together the work of researchers from the fields of private and public law, legal history, sociology and management around the three specific characteristics of heritage, namely ‘value and enhancement’, ‘identity and identification’ and ‘transmission’.

The individual in the city
The ‘The individual in the city’ theme enables us to host and develop a number of research projects focusing on the place, rights and duties of the individual within the city, whose life is part of ‘natural’ legal and social aspects, at the crossroads of several disciplines (in particular civil law, but also health law, criminal law, social law, construction law and consumer law).

Organisations and governance

The scientific ambition of the ‘Organisations and Governance’ theme is to articulate and develop work on the changes affecting the various forms of organisation that structure collective action, whatever their legal status (private or public law), their level (sub-national, national, supranational) or their purpose (serving the collective interest, purely commercial activities). The aim here is to examine the way in which these organisations respond to the challenges of the contemporary world (technological, ethical, economic, climatic, democratic, health, philosophical, moral, etc.)