Projects FCT R&D

This project brings together an international group of researchers from different disciplines (philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, international relations, history, law, cultural studies, literature) who have been conducting research for several years on issues of cosmopolitanism in its personal, social, cultural, political and legal dimensions. COSMOPOLITISM: Justice, Democracy and Citizenship without Borders supports and promotes the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through awareness-raising and reflexivity and by advancing a vision of a just world. In particular, the following objectives are envisaged:

In Portugal, mechanisms aimed at debtors in a difficult economic situation or in imminent insolvency (namely, the special proceedings for revitalization and the special proceedings for a payment agreement) have a marginal use when compared to insolvency proceedings and since 2016 there has been a sharp and steady decline in the number of special proceedings for revitalization issued. Furthermore, the average length of insolvency proceedings largely exceeds 2 years.

The aim of this project is to study the encounter between the Portuguese legal order and the native legal orders in the Portuguese overseas territories in the 18th – 20th centuries. The aim is to find out how these orders were classified, how they were used by colonizers and colonized, how they interacted and were transformed by colonial situations, in various chronologies. Legal pluralism is a central theme in the historiography on empires, but the works dedicated to it in Portuguese historiography have privileged the doctrinal reflections of the colonial elites, and not the action of the local agents of colonial justice and the native populations involved. It is known, however, that the functioning of legal pluralism emerged from the social practices of these people, the administrators and the ‘subjects’ of colonial justice.

In the context of the Rule of Law, legislative power is a tool at the service of the implementation of public policies defined at national level and, in cases such as those of the Portuguese, also at supranational level. In this sense, the way it is exercised and the acts produced in the exercise of this function, it should be subject to scrutiny by citizens, who are simultaneously addressees of the norms produced and addressees of the public policies that justify them. The importance of the accountability of the exercise of legislative power justified the creation of the Observatory of Portuguese Legislation in 2005, with the objective of contributing to the reflection on the quality of legislative policy through the analysis of Portuguese legislative production in quantitative terms (volume, distribution by type of diploma, by legislative body, by subject matter, by type of legislative initiative), a project that is still innovative and pioneering in Portugal today.