Sarah Scott Ford

Short presentation

Sarah is a postdoc at the MOBILE Centre of Excellence for Global Mobility Law. Her research is especially oriented towards understanding the role of international and national courts as fora for matters of transnational migration. 

Her postdoc project investigates free movement in West Africa through legal theory and legal sociology. She further researches how courts in Senegal deal with migration, especially in cases concerning irregular stay, trafficking and smuggling, together with research collaborator Mamadou Faye.

Sarah contributes to ANCHOR, a project that aims to understand how international judgments impact asylum decisions in Denmark, through a  comprehensive quantitative and qualitative study. This relates to her PhD project on asylum appeals in the Nordic countries, about how human rights influence this field of practice - the monograph based on this work is forthcoming in 2025.

With her research, Sarah aspires to contribute to a better understanding of how national judicial actors draw on, negotiate, and ultimately make, international law - in a domain that is highly politicised, dynamic and challenging.

Sarah teaches and supervises International Human Rights Law, International Migration Law, Indigeneity, Law and Nature & The Law of Asylum.

CV

Education

2019-2023: PhD in Law, Copenhagen University

2016-2018: MSc in Sociology of Law, Lund University

2012-2015: BA in Human Rights, Malmö University

Primary fields of research

Legal theory and empirical methods, International Law, Sociology of Law, International Migration Law, International Human Rights Law, Asylum Practice, International politics