Department of Commercial, Agricultural- and Labour Law - Research projects

Research projects

The agri-environmental law

Agri-environmental law is a field of law consisting of those legal norms, which are aimed at preventing and reducing the negative effects of agriculture while using the environment. It is also aimed at the maintenance or improvement (e.g., habitat development) of the state of the environment under the influence of agricultural cultivation.

The two main target areas of agrarian conservation are firstly the protection of natural values and resources and secondly in connection to this the quality assurance of both agricultural and food products, which has a clear and athropocentric aim. This includes ensuring that all foods are free of contamination and that no traces of chemical substances are left on them. This can only be achieved by legal means and at the same time the indirect incentives used to influence the economy require a legal framework as well.

The legal aspect of agri-environmental protection and agri-environmental law is an area of a legal system, which started growing in the recent past, and forms a point of contact between agrarian law and environmental law as a specific, “cross-lying” compound of the mentioned mixed areas of law. Its name (agri-environmental law, Agrarumweltrecht, droit de l’agroenvironnement) faithfully reflects its borderland nature. It is a part of environmental law but reasonably cannot be separated from land law as well.

The employers’ liability

The employers’ liability pervades the entirety of the economy as well as the dynamics of individual employment contracts, and it is an area of particular importance of jurisprudence and of employment law. The recent changes in this area have been featured predominantly in scientific research and in publications that lecturers from the department prepared. With those changes, the new labour code (Act I of 2012) coming into force, and the complete revision of rules governing employers’ liability will all represent further areas for research in the long term. The results of the research into this area of employers’ liability have been featured in dr. Jácint Ferencz’s doctoral thesis, which is planned for submission in 2014.