Modelling legal complexity
The legal system is a complex adaptive system of hundreds of thousands of interrelated legal documents such as legal acts, decrees, legislative memoranda, and court decisions. Legal research traditionally relies on human analysis of this legal information. Humans, however, cannot manually analyse big legal data. This creates barriers to access to law and justice: the high complexity of the legal system makes it difficult to understand the rights it grants and the obligations it imposes upon people.

Like in physics and bioinformatics, modelling big legal data using computational techniques and quantitative methods can provide an innovative understanding of legal complexity, for example by revealing new insights regarding what predicts the duration of legal procedures, the costs of cases, or what are landmark cases and how the importance of landmark cases increases or decreases over time. These models could, for example, be used to measure integration of European legal orders by quantitatively investigating how case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union is received in the case law of the various Member States.

Regulation of disruptive technologies 
Technological innovations can disrupt society, both in a beneficial and in an undesirable manner. This creates regulatory challenges that are shared by different legal orders. How do and should legal orders stimulate innovation through the law (e.g. incentives in tax laws, predictive policing in criminal law)?

Furthermore, how should law impact the design of these technologies, especially to ensure legal compliance ‘by design’, for example by including privacy regulation in technology that allows the exchange of health data across legal borders? New business models might also give rise to new legal issues, for instance in the field of influencer marketing, where influencers sell products and are or become products themselves on global social media.

The main subject of investigation of this research line is the relationship that legal orders should have with technological innovation, and how legal issues related to technology impact integration and interaction between legal orders.

Legal issues of the data economy
Data processing and automated decision-making are components of many innovative technologies in the fast-growing global data economy. They are inseparable, because automated systems rely on data processing. These elements come with specific ethical, legal, and social issues, such as issues of privacy, data protection, (cyber)security, intellectual property, taxation and competition law.

These legal issues are international in nature and need responses that also investigate the interaction and integration of legal orders. For example, the role and position of both marketeers and consumers in the marketplace is challenged: lines between purchase and licensed use of goods and services becomes blurred due to Internet of Things devices being capable of sending and receiving service provider and user information across legal borders.

The big data environment poses not only challenges related to data collection and processing, but also to transparency, accountability and liability for automated systems. Finally, these systems can pose a threat to various fundamental rights, such as equality and freedom of expression. Understanding the legal issues involved requires an in-depth understanding of the functioning of data economy and the specific technology in question.

New forms of cooperation
Globalisation, the gradual erosion of the nation-state, migratory movements and demographic changes pose new challenges for research into the principles and enforcement of law at a national, European and international level. The interaction of the various systems inevitably leads to new forms of cooperation across regional national and European borders.

The recent migrant crisis raises many questions, including legal ones in relation to identity, citizenship, international peace and security, and the safeguarding of fundamental rights of both migrants and citizens of the EU-member states. However, the notion of crossing borders is not restricted to geographical borders and needs to be interpreted in a wider sense.

Horizontal form of governance
The concept is also related to interactions between various legal orders and disciplines. In the field of crime control for instance, a multi-agency, integrated approach is advocated in which a variety of public and private agencies (police, prosecution department, local governments, tax services, social services, migration services, insurance companies, healthcare, real estate agencies, banks, schools etc.) cooperate, share information and use different legal instruments.

Such a horizontal form of governance can be found in other areas as well (i.e. labour mobility, social security etc.). Of course, a relevant question in this respect is what the consequences are of the interaction between the various systems abiding by the rule of law. 

Mixed-method approach
A growing number of national and international agencies are attempting to monitor and co-ordinate responses to contemporary problems. In many research areas, such as migration and development issues, citizenship, nationality and integration, international family relationships, social security, tax law, pensions and the prevention and repression of crime, researchers of various legal and other scientific disciplines are increasingly cooperating, using a mixed-method approach.

Doctrinal analysis and comparative legal research are being combined with other forms of empirical and interdisciplinary research.

Providing access to markets
The focus is on the role of law and other norms in facilitating and curtailing markets, and in providing access to markets. These markets are defined as systems that enable the allocation and distribution of resources, products, services and information in society through the exercise of private autonomy. Therefore questions also arise about the most appropriate legal instruments for harmonisation (within the EU), unification and coordination and their effects on behaviour of market actors.

Overall institutional set-up
It also poses questions about the optimal mix between uniformity and diversity and the content of substantive rules in the areas of private law (including the law of contract and property), company law (in particular CSR), commercial law, procedural law and consumer law.

This pillar also studies the instruments developed in public law, and the overall institutional set-up for shaping and creating access to markets.

Global exchange of goods and services
One important sub-question will be what the role of law could be in facilitating or curtailing the global exchange of goods and services (taking place 'beyond the State'). This calls for an approach that combines study of positive law with comparative law, legal theory, legal history and sociological/empirical and economic analysis.

Shape the future progress of integration
The research in this pillar focuses on the changing relationship between the national European and international legal orders and the institutional transformations that are taking place within these orders.

It thus examines how institutions and legal instruments may shape the future progress of integration and vice versa, and ultimately the rule of law. One of its focal points is the interaction between national and European levels, particularly with respect to the relation between national parliaments and the European Parliament, national/ constitutional courts and the European Courts, and national executives and the European Commission.

New modes of governance
Equally, possibilities to introduce novel institutional arrangements so as to accommodate increased flexibility and more respect for the heterogeneity of the EU and its Member States is also scrutinised, including questions regarding EU membership.

Research in this pillar will moreover address the institutional transformations caused by new modes of governance and regulation and the increasing power of the executive, and the rise of new institutional actors such as agencies both at the national and the EU level. This necessitates a profound reflection on the roles of constitutional and administrative courts and parliaments. In this regard, an important subject of study will be the appropriateness of current notions of separation or balance of powers, legitimacy and accountability.

Protection of fundamental rights 
Including questions as to how national authorities and governments need to act in the face of dissatisfaction of citizens with the EU.The impact of these institutional transformations on the protection of fundamental rights and non-economic values will also be taken into account.

The focus on economic integration and the rise of new technologies, for example, requires legal scholarship to study both fundamental rights and principles, such as nondiscrimination, equality, privacy, personal data protection, legal certainty, legitimate expectations, effective judicial remedies and non-economic values such as the protection of health, safety, and the environment. Here the EU is used as an example only. Similar issues arise also in the context of the UN and regional public international organisations.