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Élisabeth Lambert

Biography - Élisabeth Lambert

Societies, Actors and Government in Europe (SAGE), University of Strasbourg and CNRS

Élisabeth Lambert, USIAS Fellow 2020

Élisabeth Lambert is a legal expert and research director within the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working in the SAGE research unit. She specialises in issues involving the enforcement of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, access to European justice and the possibilities for victims to obtain redress for violations of their fundamental rights. As such, she has repeatedly been called upon to advise public actors, in particular the Council of Europe. She also regularly provides scientific reports for European research organisations. From January 2017 to July 2018, she was professor at an Australian university (Perth), which allowed her to become familiar with the common law system.

In recent years, her field of investigation has been environmental health (the right to a healthy and ecologically sustainable environment/pesticide regulation). In this new context, she is working with colleagues from other disciplines at the University of Strasbourg to set up a research federation on sustainability.

Her methodology calls for an understanding of phenomena that enable or hinder the circulation of norms and/or the implementation of supranational rules, the investigation of comparative law, the sociology of law (taking into account the actors and the context in the making of the norm) and the knowledge of social justice. To do this, she values an interdisciplinary approach and a field-based approach with European and national actors of the law and their implementation.

Project – Taking the right to healthy food seriously: a European perspective

01/09/2020 - 30/06/2023

The objective of this project is to explore the emergence of an individual/collective right to healthy food as a new component in European human rights law. The team plans to dissect norms, cases and preparatory works of many and varying legal provisions at the domestic and European level, in order to investigate the conditions that would contribute towards the right to healthy food, and the limits and guarantees pertaining to the implementation thereof. Norms covered will be those related to the stages of production and consumption, e.g. human rights, food law, consumers’ protection, advertisement, taxation, labelling and residues of chemical products on food. With a law-making approach, this research will build upon social justice movements and the literature on the emergence of the right to a healthy environment. A qualitative method (lexical analysis and interviews with stakeholders) will complement the traditional desk-research.

The focus on the law-making process and their implementation means that a socio-legal perspective will be adopted. To date, there has been little research to explore the making of a European right to healthy food. The results of this project would therefore bring together the separate pieces of the puzzle, as the emerging right to healthy food lies at the intersection of many disciplines and norms. In this way, it would help academics, policy-makers and all stakeholders to understand the current situation in European law and its possible future direction. It should have a direct impact on practitioners and judges who need to interpret the right to adequate food, and the right to health from a more holistic and environment-friendly perspective.

To complement the theoretical framework and qualitative research outlined above, the project will include seminars, brainstorming sessions and conferences with practitioners, policy-makers and academics. Written output is expected in the form of articles and a collective publication.

Research engineer biography - Lise Etienne

Societies, Actors and Government in Europe (SAGE), University of Strasbourg and CNRS

Lise Etienne

Lise Etienne holds a Master's degree in French and German law from the universities of Cologne and Paris 1 Panthéon - Sorbonne, equivalent to a Master 1 level (2016-2020), where she stayed to complete a Master 2 specialising in comparative public law (2020-2021).

In the framework of her Master 2, her research focus was on the comparative analysis of administrative and constitutional climate-related lawsuits in France and Germany, which formed the basis for her dissertation. She also gained practical experience in renewable energy law in the Franco-German context during a 5-month internship with the law firm SK & Partner in 2021.

From October to December 2021, Lise Etienne was recruited at the University of Strasbourg as a research engineer within the SAGE laboratory. Under the direction of Melis Aras, she participated in the Seed Money project "Landscape and sustainable energy transition: the legal protection of landscape(s) through the prism of the energy transition", supported by Eucor – The European Campus, with funding from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Studies and Research on Germany (CIERA). As part of this research project, Lise Etienne carried out a comparative analysis of French and German case law on the reconciliation of renewable energy development with landscape protection.

Since 1 January 2022, she has been working as a research engineer for Élisabeth Lambert’s USIAS project, and will analyse the regulation and litigation on the right to healthy food from a comparative approach in Europe.

Post-doc biography - Laure Hatcher-Séguy

Societies, Actors and Government in Europe (SAGE), University of Strasbourg and CNRS

Laure Hatcher-Séguy

Laure Hatcher-Séguy holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès and is specialised in questions related to food quality, health and wellbeing, market organisations and European public policies. Her thesis, directed by Professor Franck Cochoy and carried out with a doctoral research grant from the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, is entitled From nutrition to nutrition labelling: a history of the market and political domestication of nutrients. 

In this work, Laure Hatcher-Séguy traces the history of the management and use of information on the nutritional quality of food products circulating in the European market. Two specific devices are meticulously analysed: nutritional labelling and nutritional and health claims. The work is at the crossroads of research which examines the emergence of systems whose aim is to "equip" consumers' choices in economic sociology. It also concerns, political science, since the core of the study is related to the history of the regulation of information schemes related to the nutritional quality of products in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the European Union.

Her current research continues to address these questions and has been extended to all information schemes and devices that aim to promote and make visible the qualities of food products (nutritional, ecological, social). The goal is to question both their construction and their performative effects on consumption practices, but also on the practices of market players in terms of production and marketing. As the European field continues to be central to her research, Laure Hatcher-Séguy closely follows political and regulatory developments related to the European "Green Deal" and its "From Farm to Fork" strategy.

She was involved in the USIAS project between October 2020 and December 2021.

Post-doc biography - Vincent Caby

Societies, Actors and Government in Europe (SAGE), University of Strasbourg and CNRS

Vincent CabyVincent Caby holds a MSc in Political Science from Sciences Po Grenoble and a MSc in STS from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. He first worked on the evaluation of health policies for French and European public administrations (Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Drugs and Drug Addiction, European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction).

He holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po Bordeaux (2019), and was a recipient of a doctoral research grant from the French Ministry of Research. Vincent Caby studied the production and utilisation of policy advice and scientific expertise. He focused on how the French national institutes of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and for Agricultural Research (INRA) produced systematic literature reviews in medicine, health sciences and agronomy, and how France’s ministries of Health and Agriculture used such reviews. He taught qualitative and quantitative social science methods at Sciences Po Bordeaux and the theory of policy evaluation at Sciences Po Lyon. As a post-doctoral Fellow at UCLouvain in Belgium, he worked on the throughput legitimacy of the European Commission.

His research work deals with the institutionalisation of policy advice and scientific expertise: how new forms of expertise become a gold standard (an institution) in the eyes of policymakers (Caby 2020, forthcoming). Vincent Caby also addresses the effects of official reports on the public debate and the policymaking process (Caby and Chailleux 2019, forthcoming), and the theoretical and methodological challenges of investigating policy advice and scientific expertise (Caby and Ouimet 2020, forthcoming).

He worked on this USIAS project from October 2020 to June 2021.

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