The purpose is to systematize and analyze comparative the available data and to encourage the production of new data concerning the measurement of public opinion with regard to the operation of legal and judicial opinions.

This CRN provides a forum for legal educators, practitioners and advocates to exchange ideas, experiences and strategies for integrating gender into legal education and legal doctrine.  Traditional models of legal education do not effectively address women’s rights issues or explore how gender and the law interact, ultimately reinforcing gender-bias at all levels of the legal system. The full incorporation of gender into legal education and doctrine leads to a more inclusive legal culture and contributes to a justice system that is responsive to the needs and priorities of women, as it trains a new cadre of legal practitioners, advocates, policymakers and scholars to have a better understanding of women's human rights and how gender and the
law interact.

The purpose of this CRN is to bring together scholars working on different forms of lay participation in legal decision making. The legal systems of many countries incorporate laypersons in some decision-making capacity, including lay judges or assessors, mixed tribunals of law-trained and lay judges, and the jury.

Lay participation in the justice system has been justified on multiple grounds. It is said to improve decision making, to reduce the impact of biased or corrupt judges, to keep the system responsive to changing community values, to better represent the diversity of citizen experiences and perspectives, and to enhance the legitimacy of the system. Lay involvement is strongly criticized on multiple grounds as well, including charges that lay participants are incompetent or biased decision makers, lack crucial knowledge of law, or ignore the law. Scholars have also questioned whether lay participation has any real impact on legal system outcomes or whether it is serves only a legitimacy function.

This CRN will help facilitate the exchange of research findings and comparative research about lay involvement in legal decision making. What are the strengths and drawbacks of different forms of lay participation as practiced in different countries? How do a country's historical and contextual factors shape the forms of lay participation? To what extent does lay participation fulfill its multiple functions?

This Collaborative Research Network (CRN) will focus on a set of theoretical and empirical issues related to urban safety. Though the prevention of crime is a core issue, it will be embedded in a range of security problems that communities face: pressures of globalized markets, the influx of immigrants from all over the world, and an increasing sense of insecurity and consciousness of risk among citizens. Problems of security are related to welfare as well as they are redefining welfare. In particular in Western and Eastern Europe, medium-sized and even smaller cities are increasingly confronted with these problems. Processes associated with globalization and the extra-territorial movement of capital and influence in particular hit those communities where until recently citizens mostly felt secure and safe. Urban communities are the centres of social change, its impact is felt on this level most urgently, and demands for action are most pressing. The demand for safety in particular from crime and violence, but as well from "incivilities" has been widely and decisively articulated by citizens during the last decade, and local governments have increasingly responded to these fears.

The prevention of crime and the provision of a certain level of security for citizens are acknowledged and even defining obligations of public authorities. At the community level, the lack of such provisions becomes most visible, and affects the daily life of citizens. Globalization is accompanied by a process of localization in the provision of mundane security and prevention. Notwithstanding, that these are tasks of public authorities, the role of communities, and strategies of citizens in dealing with these problems are more and more acknowledged as vital factors in providing a range of security measures. The vitality and vigour of community life, the ‘efficacy' of communities thus has become a major target of research and measures of crime prevention. Obviously, a balance is needed between public policies on the one hand and those processes within communities that produce "social capital" like solidarity, trust and efficacy. Wether and in what ways this balance is achieved and how public policies can contribute to the production of social capital will be one of the core questions in the CRN.

The urgent needs and demands for public safety and security on the community level have triggered international exchange between social scientists, policy makers, particularly on the level of policing. Crime prevention measures have been im- and exported, adopted and adapted without checking if they suit the specific situation and needs of communities in different cultures and with different forms of governance. Even less exchange exists on regimes of urban and community security , and strategies of how to produce necessary "social capital" and a suitable balance between public policies and community efficacy. The dominance of crime prevention measures seems to be highly questionable, given the scope and range of related security problems and citizens' consciousness of the risks of urban life.

The CRN is designed to establish a forum of exchange for those who work on these problems and in particular want to approach the problems of urban safety within a broader perspective and with a multi-level approach, starting (a) from the experiences and consciousness of risk of citizens, (b)analysing local policies and regimes and (c) finally relating these to the embeddedness of communities in national regimes and cultures. At the conference in Budapest it will center on the exchange on research projects and will offer an opportunity to start collaborations and design comparative research projects. At the conference it will in addition promote the dissemination of research designs and methods to colleagues in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America.