Siri Gloppen is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute for research on global development and justice, and Director of the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation. She has been research coordinator at PluriCourts (Oslo University Law School); visiting researcher at Harvard University and affiliated researcher at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi.

Traditionally there has been a major cleavage between legal scholars and the social sciences: the former has examined the structure and normative content of law from the perspective of legal theory and jurisprudence. The social sciences, on the other hand, to the extent that they have been concerned with the law at all, have largely disregard-ed the normative content. More recently this has started to change. Increasingly disciplinary barriers are growing more porous. Legal scholars are collaborating with political scientist, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, computer scientists and others, to integrate empirical methods with legal scholarship. This lecture will present some examples of interdisciplinary and multimethod work into human rights from projects based at the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation, focusing on the right to water; land; health; and sexual and reproductive rights. As well as projects enquiring into the role of courts and law in democratic backlash.