DIgitalization and aCCEss to justice (DIKE) as a Research Group is a formally structured unit of the Faculty of Law in Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
Access to justice is of paramount significance for protecting and enforcing citizens’ rights. Possible tools in improving access to justice at both EU and national level are digitalization of procedures, automatization – algorithmizing – of decision-making, and the further development of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and online dispute resolution (ODR).
The interdisciplinary Research Group DIKE will focus on exploring the borderlands of law, technology, and society, with the ultimate objective of improving access to justice and building and maintaining an effective and sustainable civil justice system.
To achieve its objectives, DIKE’s activities involve both fundamental research and applied research activities. DIKE adopts an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to improve understanding from diverse perspectives and in different (law) systems. Empirical research is part of our research as well, as it helps to assess, validate, and revise our ideas and findings.
Research is a core mission of DIKE and a key ingredient of its ambition to become one of the top research groups in the field of access to justice and digitalisation in Europe and beyond.
DIKE relies on an interdisciplinary approach by drawing from legal science and other disciplines, including information technology, psychology, sociology, policymaking, and economics. The adopted interdisciplinary approach allows for the synthesis of ideas and characteristics from major disciplines in social sciences, thereby enhancing the impact of our research.
The DIKE research group has already one EU project ongoing, Towards more EFfective enFORcemenT of claimS in civil and commercial matters within the EU - EFFORTS (Van der Borght and Giacalone), and two others will start respectively next March, Small Claims Analysis Net 2 - SCAN2 (Van der Borght and Giacalone), and June, Conflict Resolution with Equitative Algorithms 2 - CREA2 (Alofs and Giacalone).