University of Helsinki

The Graduate School: Foundations of European Law

Foundations of European Law is a graduate school at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law. It is financed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and the Academy of Finland. The graduate school is a part of the Centre of Excellence in Foundations of European Law and Polity Research.

The graduate school aims at educating experts on European law who have a strong background in research and who after their graduation aim at research and teaching tasks in the university sector and international expert positions. Most fields today need researchers and experts on European law, who have the capability of critical thought.

The graduate school underlines the international nature of its operation, the guarantees of which are international teaching, a vast European co-operation network, the graduate school's own exchange programme and possible international students. The graduate school promotes relations to the working life by its trainee programme. The graduate school also invests in multidisciplinary science.

The Foundations of European Law graduate school seeks to strengthen and deepen jurisprudential European research in Finland. The traditional legal doctrines that are based on the idea of the nation state have proved to be in many aspects unsatisfactory for the control of the process of europeanization of law. Underlying European law there are many traditions of legal thinking such as Continental law, English common law tradition and international law. The critical and profound understanding of European law is not possible without the recognition and awareness of these traditions of thought on a theoretical scale and in their historical context, exceeding the point of view of the nation state.

The effects of European law have reached many spheres of social life. The co-operation, which from the beginning focused on economic activities, has begun to cover private life, environmental issues, crime prevention, social and health services etc., which has in turn meant the growing importance of European measures with respect to research on consumer law, corporate law, environmental law, criminal law and social law. Presently, the possibility of a codification of European contract and civil law is discussed.

The europeanization affects also the development of public law: constitutional law and administrative law have to be studied within the interaction of the national and the supranational level. The Europeanization also introduces new challenges for legal theory and legal philosophy. It not only requires new points of view on supranational regulation but also the re-evaluation of conventional doctrines.

Researchers