Description of research and teaching

Ville Erkkilä (PhD) is an Academy Research Fellow at the Centre for European Studies, University of Helsinki. He is a legal historian specializing in law and legality in European dictatorships. His research explores the erosion of rule-of-law structures, the maintenance of legal façades in authoritarian regimes, and the justification and legitimation of legal institutions with temporal arguments.

Erkkilä’s current research project, The Experience of Injustice: Property, Legality and Identity in Rural Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1995 (EastJustice), funded by the Research Council of Finland, investigates the socio-legal history of rural Eastern Europepr – primarily in Poland, Estonia, Finland, and the former East Germany. Adopting a comparative, long-term perspective, the project engages with broader themes such as evolving rural conceptions of property, legality, and identity, as well as contemporary challenges related to the normalization of authoritarian legal and governance practices.

Previously, Erkkilä has conducted research on socialism and legal history (e.g., 2020), on the conceptual history of law (2023), and the intertwinement of law and memory (2025). His doctoral dissertation (2019) examined German legal history from the rise of the Third Reich to the 1968 student protests, through the work of renowned legal historian Franz Wieacker. His work has appeared in journals including Law and History Review, Rethinking History, History of European Ideas, and Law and Critique.