About the project

The project covers two distinct areas of authority: police tasks in connection with operational police work, and the police and prosecuting authority’s tasks in connection with criminal proceedings. This thematic dividing line is also reflected in the sub-projects, although the research topics supplement each other.

The project is organised in four sub-projects. Each of them examines legal issues in areas in which the police and the prosecuting authority are facing new challenges that have yet to be legally clarified.

The project’s primary tasks:

1. Fill gaps in knowledge in the legal science context, both nationally and internationally.
2. Strengthen and further develop research on police and prosecution law and the academic environment at the faculty, especially by:

• ensuring that particularly competent persons can be used in research on the core tasks of the police and prosecuting authority.
• carrying forward the results and the research expertise gained during the police and prosecution law project ‘The Functionality of the Criminal Law System’.
• facilitating new recruitment by offering a research fellowship in police science or police/prosecution law, and by supervising students writing master's theses on these areas of the law.

3. Develop new, and update existing legal literature and textbooks on police and prosecution law. 
4. Strengthen cooperation with the discipline of administration and organisational science at UiB and the police law research communities at the Norwegian Police University College, the University of Oslo (UiO) and abroad, primarily in the Nordic countries and Northern Europe.

Academic objectives.
The project will concentrate on research topics that all address current issues in areas where the police and prosecuting authority are facing new challenges that have yet to be legally clarified and where new research-based knowledge is needed. These challenges raise fundamental questions such as: the function of the principle of legal authority as the foundation of the rule of law; the relationship between different authorities’ tasks; whether the police and prosecuting authority’s tasks and the legal framework for their social mission need to be clarified and/or redefined in order to meet practical needs, and questions about how efficiency and protection of privacy considerations can best be safeguarded and balanced when authority is exercised.