Svenska IVR

Eva-Maria Svensson

Eva-Maria Svensson is Professor of law at the Department of Law, School of Business, Law and Economics at the University of Gothenburg. In 2005-2015 she was Professor of law at the Faculty of Law, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. During 2012 – 2017 she was also the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research (GIG) at the University of Gothenburg. She was awarded a LL.D. at the same university in 1997 after completing and defending her dissertation Genus och rätt [Gender and Law]. En problematisering av föreställningen om rätten and became docent in 2003. She has been a visiting professor at the Melbourne Law School at The University of Melbourne, Peter A. Allard Law School at the University of British Columbia.

Her research interests include numerous fields of knowledge, such as legal theories and methods, philosophy of law, freedom of expression, gender equality, gender legal studies, critical legal studies, indigenous studies, and ageing studies. A contextual epistemological approach runs throughout the research. The current project (2023–2024) is A contextual legal philosophy – a feminist Nordic legal philosophy funded by RJ Sabbatical. It takes the contextual presumption central to feminist legal philosophy (FLP) as a starting point for a synthesizing project which aims to bring consistency into the scholarly debate by being more sensitive to the outcomes of critical feminist encounters with the legal philosophical tradition.

In 2013-2016 Svensson directed the interdisciplinary research project Market Driven and Democracy Driven Freedom of Expression which centered around the question of whether democracy and free speech are promoted by a strengthened constitutional protection of commercial messages. She has also been engaged in international collaborative projects focusing on Gender Equality in the Arctic involving researchers from the Arctic nations. Crucial in this research is the demarcation line between law and politics. In addition, she was part of The Nordic Research Network for Sámi and Indigenous Peoples’ Law (NORSIL).

Svensson’s publications include Nordic Equality and Anti-Discrimination Laws in the Throes of Change Legal developments in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland, together with Anne Hellum, Ingunn Ikdahl, Vibeke Strand (eds.) (Routledge 2023), Rättsdogmatik – som rättsvetenskapligt perspektiv och metod [Legal dogmatics – a legal scholarly perspective and method] together with Åsa Gunnarsson (Studentlitteratur 2023), Distanciation and inequalities in the Finnish and Swedish monitoring of elder care housing in Arctic communities, together with Heli Valokivi (Routledge 2023), Building and Sustaining Freedom of Expression, Considering Sweden, together with Andrew T. Kenyon and Maria Edström (Nordicom Review 2017), Sami Legal Scholarship: The Making of a Knowledge Field (Ashgate 2015), De lege interpretata – om behovet av metodologisk reflektion [– On the Need for Methodological Reflection] (Juridisk publikation 2014),  Genusrättsvetenskap [Gender Legal Studies], together with Åsa Gunnarsson, Jannice Käll and Wanna Svedberg (Studentlitteratur 2018).

Contact: eva-maria.svensson@law.gu.se