Teaching

Institutionel forfatningsret og EU-forfatningsret 

Short presentation

2023 - Associate professor (promotion track to full professorship), Faculty of Law, Copenhagen

2016 - Professor, European University Institute, Florence (part time from 2023)

Urška’s scholarship falls in the domain of European Union law and institutions, especially the internal market, free movement of persons and European citizenship. She is intersted in the process of integration through law an case-law, judicial authority, the decision-making of the European Court of Justice and the mechanics of court-induced legal change. Her research introduces tools of citation network analysis, machine learning, expert coding, and insights from judicial politics into the study of legal concepts like precedent or primacy and legal processes, like the interaction of national courts with the European Court of Justice.  

Urška studied law in Ljubljana, Slovenia (BA and MA postgraduate degree) and obtained a LLM degree from The College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium. She defended her PhD thesis, The European Palimpsest: Justificatory practices and precedent construction at the Court of Justice of the European Union, at the University of Copenhagen in 2012. Since then, Urška was a guest researcher at King's College, London, the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, a Grotius Scholar at the University of Michigan, and a visiting professor at the Columbia Law School (EUI exchange). Her articles appear in the leading legal and political science journals, including the Common Market Law Review, the European Law Review, The American Journal of Comparative Law, European Law Open, and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Urška is currently directing a five-year project Judging Under the Influence, financed by the Sapere Aude Research Leader Grant (Danish Council for Independent Research). The project critically revisits the influence of national courts, the European Commission, and the Member State governments on the Court of Justice’s interpretive techniques, case outcomes, and the fashioning of legal concepts and doctrines.

Urška has co-founded the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies (ESELS), co-coordinates a collaborative research project IUROPA (with Daniel Naurin as the principal investigator), financed by the Research Environment Grant of the Swedish Research Council, and serves as a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior (with Lee Epstein, Keren Weinshall and Gunnar Grendstad).

At Mobile, Urška coordinates the work package Legal Change, examining how law responds to external events and crises. 

Recent and forthcoming publications

Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior (Forthcoming in 2023) (editor with Lee Epstein, Keren Weinshall and Gunnar Grendstad).

‘Route 66: The Mutations of the Internal Market Through the Prism of Citation Networks’ (forthcoming in the International Journal of Constitutional Law), with Sebastiano Piccolo and Lucia Lopez Zurita

‘The European Court of Justice, an Able but Unwilling Lawmaker’ (forthcoming in Bruno DeWitte, Elise Muir and Mark Dawson (ed) Revisiting Judicial Politics in the EU, Edward Elgar), with Silje Synnøve Lyder Hermansen

Recognizing the Legal Characteristics of the Judgments of the European Court of Justice: Difficult But Not Impossible (JURIX 2022), with Alessandro Contini, Sebastiano Piccolo and Lucia Lopez Zurita

Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law's Embeddedness, by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola, Antoine Vauchez (eds) European Law Review 2022 47(6) (Book review)

Law and orders: The orders of the European Court of Justice as a window in the judicial process and institutional transformations. (2022) European Law Open, 1(3), with Lucia López Zurita, Stein Arne Brekke, and Daniel Naurin