Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for the project “Truth, Information, Democracy and Law”

About this job

Job description A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (SKO 1352) is available as part of the project Truth, information, democracy and law (TIDAL) - Department of Private Law (TIDAL) funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and Norid AS. The fellow will be responsible for their own research and work closely with the TIDAL team at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law - Department of Private Law, UiO (NRCCL). The project runs from April 2026 until March 2030. In addition to researchers at the NRCCL, the project team includes researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University of Bergen, University of Tromsø, Lund University, Bond University, BI Norwegian Business School, and Boston University. At the NRCCL, the core project team comprises four people, including the postdoctoral fellow. The project is led by Professor Lee A. Bygrave. The appointment period lasts three years without teaching and administrative duties, or four years with teaching and administrative duties making up 25% of the total workload. A four-year fellowship requires that the candidate can contribute to the Faculty of Law's current teaching needs. If the Postdoctoral Fellow does not already have qualifications that meet the requirements for an associate professor position, UiO shall facilitate the acquisition of such competence during the employment period. More about the position The TIDAL project concerns the legal preconditions for a well-functioning democracy in an age marked by increasing generation and dissemination of disinformation, misinformation, and other forms of information disorder (ID). Drawing upon cross-disciplinary insights and approaches, including a policy field study of stakeholder viewpoints in Norway and the United Kingdom, the project tackles the fundamental question of whether the law needs to be reformed in order to tackle ID more effectively and, if yes, what avenue(s) of reform would be most sensible. It does so in light of the vexing problem that measures to combat ID in the name of securing or promoting democracy can end up undermining democracyʼs bedrock by tightening various freedoms and accountability frameworks that help buttress democracy and the rule of law. The TIDAL project not only examines how best to overcome the latter problem, but elucidates a range of other related matters. These include: the effects of recent legal initiatives by the European Union (EU) to curb ID; the interaction of hard law and soft law codes in this regulatory domain; and current geopolitical tensions at the global level over appropriate legal-regulatory strategies for tackling ID. At a more fundamental jurisprudential level, the project interrogates the relationship between law and the promotion of truth, analysing the borderlines between when law penalizes the dissemination of lies, “untruths” and other false or misleading information and when it abstains from doing so, along with the rationale(s) for either course of action. As part of elucidating the relationship of ID and the law with a view to identifying optimal regulatory strategies for reducing the deleterious effects of ID, the project pursues five main sub-objectives: (1) to map the non-legal structural factors causing ID, drawing upon scholarship in the social sciences and information sciences; (2) to develop an holistic understanding of ID that bridges insights from the social sciences and information sciences with insights from legal-regulatory scholarship; (3) to assess how the law, in light of these insights, currently facilitates and impedes ID; (4) to evaluate what role law should play to remedy ID in the future and to develop and assess new norms, legal concepts, and regulatory frameworks, innovating legal treatment of ID; (5) to assess the legal innovations within the wider geopolitical situation which Norway finds herself in, with a view to minimizing jurisdictional “overreach”. The postdoctoral fellow is expected to work closely with TIDAL team members in pursuing the above-listed objectives. The postdoctoral fellow is also expected to engage in international dissemination activities and collaborate with key scholars in the field, outside the project group. Part of these activities will involve participation in the collection, coding, and analysis of data from policy field studies, writing research articles and other publications (e.g. book chapters, blogposts), participating in the ongoing reporting from the project, and assisting the project leader in the daily operation of the project. Qualification requirements Applicants must hold a degree equivalent to a Norwegian doctoral degree (PhD) in Law or another relevant social science discipline, such as Political Science or Sociology. Applicants must have submitted their doctoral dissertation for evaluation at the time of application and the dissertation must be approved by the time of appointment. Applicants must have an excellent command of English, necessary for publishing in h

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