LSC is an interdisciplinary project in which scholars from the humanities, law, and social sciences work together to investigate issues that affect the role of law in social cohesion. The starting point of the research is a comprehensive understanding of social cohesion. It is based on the idea that social cohesion is created by democratically designed relations of recognition and acceptance for individual heterogeneity. Law and politics play a key role in guaranteeing these conditions.

On the one hand, law can stabilize society. On the other hand, it can produce the basic consensus on freedom only to a very limited extent. This ambivalent position is reflected in current debates on legal theory. LSC's various projects address both the cohesive potential of law and its countervailing potential to reinforce particularization and polarization.

LSC's research is intra-, inter- as well as transdisciplinary. Different sub-disciplines are combined, such as those of public, civil, and criminal law. Furthermore, law is not only considered from an internal perspective. In order to tap into its meaning and function for social cohesion, perspectives from law, political science, economics, and other humanities and socio-legal disciplines are included on an equal footing. Finally, LSC also gives validity to actors who are otherwise often ignored in research and therefore also gives a voice to a variety of social entities such as companies, associations, parties and networked social movements up to the state administration.