The Centre
The Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) was founded in 1967 by Chaïm Perelman, Paul Foriers, Henri Buch and René Dekkers. It became a driving force of the second generation of the Brussels School.
The Brussels School deepened and renewed the conception and methods that have characterised it since the early twentieth century, at the intersection of sociological legal theory and legal pragmatism. It emphasised judicial argumentation and worked to reintroduce general principles of law, fundamental rights and values into positive law. In 2006, the Centre adopted the name “Perelman Centre” in tribute to one of its founders, the father of the New Rhetoric.
In the tradition of the Brussels School, the Perelman Centre adopts a pragmatic method and conception of law, rooted in a strong and enduring tradition of collective research. Firmly oriented towards practice and international engagement, this research emphasises the observation and comparison of the effective implementation of legal norms in society; the normative dynamics at work as society evolves and changes; and normative innovation through legal engineering and engagement in the field, including advocacy for causes in the struggle for law. Its analytical methods favour a micro-legal approach to cases from a strategic, comparative, interdisciplinary and pluralist perspective.
The Perelman Centre’s team currently comprises around fifteen full-time researchers, recruited from diverse disciplines and countries. Members publish their work in French, English and Spanish. Their research focuses principally on (1) transformations of law and normativities in the context of globalisation and the emergence of global law; (2) a comparative approach to human rights, centred on their effective implementation; and (3) an epistemological analysis of the tools of legal reason, particularly methods of legal argumentation and interpretation, together with an examination of legal transformations in the light of the history of ideas.
