The Team

Professor Karen McAuliffe is the principal investigator and team leader on the LLECJ project.  Throughout her career, both within and outside of academia, she has focused on trying to understand the relationship between law, language and translation in multilingual legal orders.  Prior to entering academia she worked as a lawyer-linguist at the Court of Justice of the EU, and it was that experience that sparked her interest and intellectual curiosity in the role and potential impact of translation on the development of EU law.  You can find out more about Karen’s research here.

Dr Liana Muntean is a research associate who has been working on the LLECJ project since January 2018.  Liana’s background is in European and comparative constitutional law and prior to entering academia she worked as a lawyer at the European Court of Human Rights.  Her role on the LLECJ project includes carrying out interviews with various actors at the Court of Justice of the EU to find out about their own role perceptions and the impact that language may have in their day to day work.  She is currently researching the role of the Advocate General at that court.

Ewelina Tylec joined the LLECJ project as a research associate in February 2018.  Her background is in human rights and international law.  Prior to joining the LLECJ project she worked for the International IDEA Constitution Building Programme in The Hague.  Her role on this project includes carrying out a systematic literature review on the role of the Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Ann Evans is the LLECJ project administrator.  She is responsible for organising events and the general administration of the project.  Ann works part-time (Monday-Thursday mornings) and can be contacted at a.p.evans@bham.ac.uk

Interns

Victoria Abbott is a postgraduate student studying a Criminal Law and Criminal Justice LLM at the University of Birmingham, where she also completed her LLB.

Helga Polz is an undergraduate student in her second year of Law with German Law at the University of Birmingham. She joined the LLECJ project as a research intern in August 2018.

Key Collaborators

Dr Rafał Jaworski is a research associate at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, working in the field of computational linguistics. He has been collaborating with the LLECJ team since September 2018, developing a specialised tool for the project based on the COPYCAT computer programme.  Rafał’s area of expertise is in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, including text classification, computer-aided translation and information retrieval.

Former Team Members

Dr Virginia Mattioli was a research associate on the LLECJ project from May-November 2018.  Her role on the LLECJ project was to carry out corpus linguistic analysis on the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice.  Virginia holds a PhD in applied languages literature and translation from the University of Barcelona.  Her main research interests are in language and and philology, as well as translation and she has worked as a translator in the private sector.  Virginia now works as a lecturer at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile.

Nadia Woodall was an administrator on the LLECJ project from November 2017 to May 2018.  She was responsible for organising the second workshop on Precedent in EU Law: The Linguistic Aspect as well as for the general administration of the project.

Dr Aleksandar Trklja was a research fellow on the LLECJ project from November 2013 until July 2016.  His role included carrying out corpus and discourse analyses of EU jurisprudence and developing a theoretical explanation of relations between law and language in the EU legal order.  Alex returned to the LLECJ project for one month in September 2017 before taking up a teaching post in linguistics at the University of Vienna, where he is now based.

Dr Gar Yein Ng was a research fellow on the LLECJ project from November 2014 to May 2015.  In that time she carried out two systematic literature reviews: one on constitutional pluralism and one on the notion of de facto precedent in EU case law.  Gar Yein’s own research interests include the training of judges and the role of judges vis-a-vis the legislator from a comparative perspective.  She is now working as a lecturer in law at the University of Buckingham.

Irene Christophers was the LLECJ project administrator while the project was based at the University of Exeter (2013-2016).  Unfortunately Irene was not able to move with the project to Birmingham, but our loss was definitely Exeter University’s gain! She is currently working at Exeter University’s Penryn campus as a research finance administrator.

Liana Turner worked as an administrator on the LLECJ project in 2016 to help manage the move of the project from the University of Exeter to the University of Birmingham.  Liana now works in the Student Experience Team at the University of Birmingham.