The focus of my scholarship is in
(i) private international law (doctrine, theory and history);
(ii) comparative law and legal history;
(iii) contract/commercial law and dispute resolution, in addition to
(iv) broader contributions to the doctrinal/systematic development of Cyprus law.
Doctrinal legal analysis is my primary preoccupation but I have sought to draw on both humanities and social sciences for concepts and tools, while developing an holistic, coherent approach mindful of both culture and policy considerations. In this regard, historical and comparative insights have proven especially valuable.

History of Private International Law

This an area in which I have been working since the early stages of my career, while my approach continues to evolve.
My starting point in this regard has been doctrinal, relying on history for better understanding and explaining/illustrating the development of conflicts doctrine.
I have been especially mindful of the “uses of history" in the doctrinal discourse, and was indeed among the first in this field to approach the formation of historical consciousness, and the “derivative” historical literature used in that regard, as an object of study on its own.
My theoretical premises note:
- the importance of the creation of a self-conscious, autonomous discipline of private international law (by what I have called classical conflict of laws);
- the dialectics of a triangular relation between “private international law,” “domestic/private law” and “international law.”
- [theory and practice]
- [Foundation and normative]
In my historical work, I have been doing close readings of canonical texts (but also texts epitomising a paradigm) with a view to connecting them both to their own historical and argumentative context and to the “conflicts” discourse in which they have been integrated and — often — given new meanings.
The flagship of my approach is, at present, Pre-Classical Conflict of Laws —a mid-career work reprising my doctoral dissertation.
But my approach continues to evolve and be enriched: for example, my 2020 article on the “Doctrinal Beginnings of Private International Law” in the Yearbook of Private International Law constitutes an exercise in the history of glossators' [High Medieval] “conflicts” doctrine, building on the book's brief discussion of how such material featured in present-day historical consciousness.
When it comes to Early Modern conflict of laws, I have begun a more systematic research of eighteenth-century French doctrine, which constitutes a neglected yet important link between the better known “statutists” and the early to mid-nineteenth century developments that led to classical conflict of laws. Apart from my trademark close reading of the texts of Boullenois and Froland, in a 2019 ICECS paper I tried to connect these jurists, who produced professional legal literature, to the intellectual developments of their context, thus bringing together A. Lainé, J. Dawson and modern Enlightenment studies.

Historiography of Doctrine

My work on the historical consciousness of legal doctrine (and theory) could be divided into three streams:
- close readings of influential individual authors’ uses of history;
- a history of historical literature;
- typologies of historical narratives in the literature.
As to the former, I have shown the instrumentalism of secondary historical treatments often treated as “value neutral” in my study on Friedrich Juenger’s history of the conflict of laws, and my work on the historical invocations of especially Schmitthoff and Goldman and the lex mercatoria. I presented in UPIER 2019 and will soon complete a corollary exercise on the respective narrative of an economist, Bruce Benson.
Chapter 2 of Preclassical Conflict of Laws presents the main example of the latter two streams in my published work, but the relation between the construction of a discipline and historical invocations is told in more detail in an unpublished, long draft on the “Historiography of Private International Law,” to which I expect to return. My essay “Towards a genealogy of global law,” attempted a similar exercise with regard to that milieu, including a typology of “global law” invocations). opening the road for further work, and drawing connections between the ever-evolving conceptualisations of natural law and ius gentium and the medieval ius commune. The next step is a 40-page article on “Pre-Historical Private International Law,” in the next Yearbook of Private International Law, which provides a typology in explaining how the presentation of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages has evolved in conflict-of-laws literature, in correspondence with doctrinal and sociological developments.


My paper on Genealogies of Global Law

Comparative Law

In many of my writings, I employed comparative-law tools and concepts in order to understand / describe the workings of Cyprus law to both insiders and outsiders.
My 2013 JCLS article on “Cyprus as a Mixed Legal System” is frequently cited as a primer on the legal system of Cyprus and for the proposition of Cyprus being a mixed jurisdiction. I was only the second to describe Cyprus as a mixed jurisdiction, yet the article constituted the first attempt to engage with comparative-law theory on the matter and identify factors that differentiate Cyprus from the classic mixed jurisdictions in the “third legal family”).
In my subsequent work, I have been developing further these ideas.

• In “Reconstructing Mixity” (2015), I drew from contract, civil procedure, marital property and international civil litigation case studies to illustrate the complexities of the law in action. I want to elaborate a more complete outlook of the theory (indeed theories) of sources and legal methodologies on the ground: my ongoing work includes a few additional such case studies.
• - I went further with “Law, Legal Elites and the Legal Profession” (2017), which set the grounds for a comparison with other small states, highlighting cases of “mutation” and outlining how the power structures of the legal profession (such as the “gatekeeper” groups of the elite) have ensured a “common law” legal culture.
• - My ongoing work takes a closer look, with empirical overtones, on the actual practice of civil litigation in Cyprus and how it is differentiated from the “English” doctrine in place: following my 2019 essay on civil justice in Greek, I am elaborating further its socio-legal analysis in an English-language piece nearing completion.

Cyprus Law

Brexit

Attorney General

Independent Officers