Researcher in the Spotligt: Peter Szigeti

Name: Péter Dániel Szigeti
Position in the Faculty of Law: TIAS Collegium Fellow
Degrees: SJD (Harvard Law School, 2015), LL.M. (Harvard Law School, 2008), Master 2 recherche (Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), 2006), J.D. (ELTE (Budapest), 2005)
Fields of interest: property law and property theory; environmentalism and its history; legal history and the history of ideas more generally; public international law and other disciplines about the global social order (global history, economic history, development economics, international relations, geopolitics, etc.); migration law and migration history.

Describe your career path. What led you to where you are today?

I started studying law in order to become an attorney, because my parents thought that I was argumentative enough to become a good lawyer. Very quickly, I became disillusioned with legal education as it was practiced in Hungary in the early 2000s. Very little intellectual engagement was demanded of students; instead, the focus was purely on memorizing statutes by heart, and regurgitating them during the exams. I was attracted to legal research partly as a reaction to the intellectual poverty of my environment (“there has got to be more to the law than this!”), and partly due to being inspired by a few books and articles on critical international law, that I happened to find by chance at Central European University’s library. By the time I approached graduation in 2005, I knew that I had to leave Hungary to have a meaningful career, and I suspected that specializing in public international law would be the easiest way to have an international career.

In 2005, Hungary had just joined the European Union, and lots of “older” EU member states offered scholarships for students from the “East.” I was lucky enough to get awarded a French Government Scholarship, and to be accepted to a Master’s program at Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne). I was also very lucky to have met David Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the fathers of critical international legal studies, at a guest lecture he gave in Paris. David’s lecture was the intellectual high point of the entire year, and apparently I made a good enough impression for him to eventually give me a letter of recommendation to apply to Harvard.

Eventually, I completed both the LL.M. and the SJD program at Harvard Law School. Finding a permanent position was nevertheless difficult. Finally, after three successive post-doctoral fellowships (one year at the EUI in Florence, one year at McGill in Montreal, and one year at NYU in New York City), I was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Alberta, in Western Canada.

I started teaching in Edmonton, Alberta in 2018: over the next six years, I taught immigration law, property law, jurisprudence, and digital law. I also coached the University of Alberta’s Jessup team for five years, and I held two short visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and at UCLouvain. It has been a busy six years. In the summer of 2024, I was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor at the University of Alberta, and I was also granted the three-year Collegium Fellowship at TIAS and the University of Turku Faculty of Law. It’s spectacular to finally have the time to concentrate on research again.

What projects are you currently working on?

My application project for TIAS was to write a book on a sustainable system of private law. It’s quite incredible to what extent the legal system ignores the material world. Even property law, which is supposed to be about “the law of things”, is mostly about gaining and dividing property through possession, inheritance, and so forth. No wonder legal principles have changed so little since the late Roman Empire, despite the enormous changes in the economy, society and our understanding of nature. I believe that this is untenable, especially if we are taking the turn towards a circular economy seriously. “Greening” private law (and constitutional law) is going to be difficult, but it will be inevitable.

In addition to this principal project, I am also working on a lot of “leftover” research projects from last year: an article on the private law aspects of “the right to have rights”; a book on the intellectual history of migration law; an article on property law and animals; an article on jurisdiction in international law. I do want to use these three years in Finland to be as productive as possible!

Have your interests evolved since finishing your studies?

Teaching a new subject leads to a deeper engagement with it than any amount of research-directed reading can by itself. I started my SJD with the intention of becoming a professor of public international law, with some knowledge of the philosophy of law. However, during my first post-doc at McGill, the only subject that I could teach was immigration law; and when I was hired by the University of Alberta, property law was the main subject for which they needed more teachers. Teaching a completely new subject is like “building an airplane while flying the airplane,” as they say, and it can’t be too pleasant for the students, either. It has, however, always expanded my knowledge and interest in the law by leaps and bounds, every time I was forced to start teaching a new course.

What would you do if you were not a researcher?

Undoubtedly, I would be working in the hospitality industry: as a waiter, a bartender, or perhaps as a cook. Preparing food and drink is a hobby and a passion for me, and it also used to be a part-time job during my SJD studies. When I was moving from one single-year post-doctoral appointment to the next, without any permanent appointment on the horizon, I certainly thought about opening a bar, and creating “special offers” for guests: buy two drinks, get free legal advice!

What inspires you?

Great people and great books definitely inspire me. Fortunately, there are many of both: too many to get to know all of them, in fact! Being a TIAS fellow gives me the time to make a dent in the long list of fascinating books that I have bought or downloaded in the last few years; and the University of Turku is full of intelligent, curious, passionate and friendly scholars with whom it is a pleasure to.