Michael Molavi

Associate Professor

Research Areas

• Comparative Sociology of Law
• Legal Mobilisation
• Access to Justice
• Lawfare

Current Research

My research spans several areas in sociology of law with a focus on legal mobilisation, lawfare, access to justice, and legal group formations across diverse socio-juridical contexts. I draw on a range of approaches and traditions, often in a comparative mode, including law and social movements, environmental justice, critical and decolonial theory, and comparative legal studies.

I am currently the Principal Investigator of Protest as a Democracy Test: Protest Culture under Transformation and as a Transformative Power (ProTest), a major research project funded by Horizon Europe. The project analyses the context, state of the art, and potential trajectories of protest politics and cultures, focusing on countries within the European Union and the Eastern Partnership across three democratic categories: consolidated democracies (Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden), new democracies (Hungary, Poland, Romania), and developing democracies (Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).

Building on the ongoing Decolonial Sociology of Law Seminar Series, which I co-founded in the Department, I am completing a monograph on indigenous “out of place” positionality. The book investigates how displacement reshapes knowledge and subjectivity through a self-reflexive modality that integrates lived experience with critical and decolonial theory and practice. In doing so, it interrogates how law and society shape and are shaped by "out of place" peoples.

I am also completing a major project on class actions, the culmination of over a decade of research on collective claims-making and legal mobilisation. Drawing on a comparative inquiry into the political origins of the globalisation of class actions, this book explores the legal vehicle as an artefact of the social, economic, and political forces that have shaped late and post-modernity, through the prism of emblematic cases such as the Residential Schools class actions in Canada.