Mikele Schultz-Knudsen

Mikele Schultz-Knudsen

Postdoc

Mikele Schultz-Knudsen is a postdoc at CECS, Faculty of Law. His research mainly centers around the role of law in diverse societies (including cultural, religious, and sexual diversity), especially within areas of family law and constitutional law. He has special expertise in the field of "Law and Religion".

In 2021, he completed his PhD project, in which he investigated interactions between Danish law and practised Islam. His project included both a theoretical analysis of the interactions between these two systems, and two empirical studies of how Danish courts and Danish Muslims deal with these interactions, such as in cases regarding inheritance, child custody, and economical disputes between spouses.  

Recently, in 2021, he has been one of the editors of the publication “Nordic and Muslim: Emerging Legal Practices”, which investigates how bridges are being built between Nordic legal practices and Muslim legal practices. The publication includes contributions from a number of researchers within the field, including an introduction written by Mikele that summarises the developments, as well as an article written by Rubya Mehdi and Mikele with the title “Marital Rape in Denmark and Pakistan: Minorities, Culture and Law”.

In 2021, he launched a new research initiative, which integrates teaching and research by engaging students in concrete research. In 2021 the project focused on how the preparatory works to the Danish Constitution deals with religion, and in 2022 it focused on criminal law cases on religion. In 2021, the initiative was supported by a special grant from the University of Copenhagen.

Mikele took his Bachelor and Master in Law at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has since then worked first as an assistant-attorney in the law firm Bruun & Hjejle and then as an attorney at the Danish employer organisation Dansk Industri, before joining CECS. He has also taken the official Mediator Education for Danish Attorneys.

The relationship between Danish law and other legal orders has been a recurrent theme in his career. As an attorney, he was involved in the highly principled Ajos-case, concerning the relationship between Danish law and EU law, which the team he was part of won. He also worked on the constitutional relationship with Greenlandic law as well as the regulation of the partly self-governed collective labour law system. 

He has been part of creating the new course “Law and Religion” (BA-level), which he is also teaching. Simultaneously, he is a member of the Faculty’s course group for the rule of law, democracy and European integration. Earlier, he has been teaching the courses "Introduction to Danish Law" (MA-level), “Family Law and Inheritance Law” and "Fundamental Rights of the Individual" (both BA-level) at the University of Copenhagen, as well as "Constitutional Law" (BA-level) at Aarhus University.

He is a member of the editorial committee for “Naveiñ Reet: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research”, an annual interdisciplinary research journal. He is also the contributor for Denmark to the yearly report "I·CONnect-Clough Center Global Review of Constitutional Law", which assesses the constitutional developments across many jurisdictions. 

In 2019, he was also the National Academic Supervisor for ELSA's Nordic Legal Research Group on Family Law, during which he supervised a group of Danish law students who together with students from other countries published the book "The Division of Property Between Unmarried Cohabitees - a Nordic Perspective on Living Together". He is also a member of the International Network of Scholars Researching Unofficial Marriages

 

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