Security issues are becoming increasingly significant in today’s world, and on its way to European integration Georgia should carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of its own national security and its compatibility with European security concepts.To this end, research on “The Europeanization of Georgia’s National Security” was carried out by Lela Janashvili, Associate Professor and Head of Internationalization and Scholarly Research Department at the TSU Faculty of Law. This research was supported by the Open Society Foundation within the framework of the Global Faculty Grants Program in 2013-2014. It was undertaken at the PublicLaw and Political Science Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Joan Lluís Pérez Francesch, Head of the Constitutional Law Department and of the research group “Freedom, democracy and the transformation of states”, supervised the project.

Students have become increasingly interested in penitentiary and probation law, which has led to the creation of a Georgian textbook, Probation Law. A co-author of the textbook noted that the popularity of the previous publication, Penitentiary Law released in 2014, written by Moris Shalikashvili, Givi Mikanadze, and Maia Khasia, led to the idea of the new textbook. Penitentiary Law is very popular in academic circles, and with practicing lawyers and students. Importantly, several other Georgian universities have included this textbook in their academic syllabi. The authors of the new book are Moris Shalikashvili as well as Giorgi Arsoshvili, Head of the National Probation Agency, and Givi Mikanadze, Associate Professor at the University of East European Studies and Project Manager of the European Council Department of Criminal Law. They carried out research on probation law in 2014-2015 and published the textbook in 2015.

In 2014, the Open Society-Georgia Foundation sponsored a project entitled Liberalizing Trends in Georgian Criminal Law organized at the initiative of a group of TSU Law Faculty Professors. As TSU law professors clarify, the incentive to undertake such a project was to address the tendencies prevailing in Georgian legislation since 2004. The authoritarian influence on Georgian legislators was reflected by a number of changes, for example more acts were criminalized; the composition of already existing crimes were expanded; penalties were changed in such a way that the judge was not entitled to pass individualized punishments; and issuing fines, as additional punishments, became unfairly common. Furthermore, the principle of absorption while having the case of several crimes was changed into the rule of accumulating crimes.

In 2014, Nova Science Publishers issued a book entitled Laffer- Keynesian Synthesis and Macroeconomic Equilibrium by Georgian economists Iuri Ananiashvili, Professor at the TSU Faculty of Economics and Business and Head of the Department of Econometrics and Vladimer Papava, TSU Rector and Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business. The book, consisting of four chapters, has been highly recommended by famous economists Farrokh K. Langdana, Professor at the Finance and Economics Department at Rutgers Business School; Louis H. Ederington, Professor at the University of Oklahoma, and Evgeny Balatsky, Chief Research Fellow at the Moscow Central Economics and Mathematics Institute. The book will help specialists and readers interested in general macroeconomic patterns to clarify the role of taxes in the process of economic development.

Development, economic growth and raising the standard of living in the country are all linked directly to capital market development. One of the real levers, and the most acceptable and practical forms of investment are to invest in equities through the stock market. It is clear for the developed world how important the organized stock market is. This includes Western Europe, USA, Canada, Japan, China and other countries with powerful stock industries such as the New York Stock Exchange; Euronext; NASDAQ OMX; the London Stock Exchange and many others. The mediation business or brokerage/investment firms include Merrill Lynch; Morgan Stanley; Goldman Sachs; J.P. Morgan; Barclays Capital and many other investment banks. The Georgian Investment Group + (or GIG+) is headed by Davit Aslanishvili, Assistant Professor at the Department of Finance and Banking of the TSU Faculty of Economics and Business. He serves as Chairman of Supervisory Board and has conducted many studies on the Georgian stock market, its development and current situation.

In Georgia there are few, if any, studies that explore the philosophical or psychological aspects of law. A recent publication by a TSU Professor of Law is thus a milestone event in the development of Georgian jurisprudence. The main topic of the work addresses the individual and the law.

Besarion Zoidze is Full Professor at the TSU Faculty of Law, with a PhD in Law.  He has completed a 250-page book uniting 93 essays, entitled “For the Cognition of the Practical Existence of Law: Primarily in the Context of Human Rights”. It was published by the TSU Publishing House in 2013.   “Mr. Zoidze’s research seeks answers to fundamental issues of law and, generally, to human social coexistence. It prompts us to ask new questions rather than to fall under the influence of already existing answers, without unleashing any criticism,” said the Editor of the book, Professor Giorgi Khubua.

New legal demands emerged in Georgia parallel to the process of transition from a communist economy to the capitalist system. It was very difficult to meet these demands, as there were few relevant materials in Georgian legal literature.

To comply with emerging developments in the legal system, in 2009 TSU Professor Irakli Burduli began working on a publication entitled the Basics of Joint-Stock Company Law. In 2010 he published the first volume and on November 29, 2013, TSU hosted the presentation of the second volume published by Meridian Editions. The author plans to publish the next volume by 2015. Although there is some Georgian literature on the joint-stockcompany law and capitalist society law, this monograph is the first of its sort, considering the scope of the research.

The recognition of the right to life and its restriction is one of the most controversial issues in the modern world. International laws on human rights recognize the right to life, but in most cases it is unclear from which particular moment that right is protected, and ranges anywhere from the moment of impregnation to the moment of birth. The European Commission on Human Rights has refrained from defining the moment of the right to life in the context of abortion. There are only a few laws which clearly recognize the moment of impregnation as the beginning of the right to life. The issue of children’s rights before birth is found in the Convention on the Rights of the Child which was signed by Georgia in 1994. It clearly and explicitly recognizes a child’s right to legal protection before the birth. Based on this norm and with due consideration to the principles of the Convention, many countries have developed legislation which secures a child’s right to life under certain conditions.

In December 2012, at the initiative of the Ministry of Corrections and Legal Assistance of Georgia, the LEPL Penitentiary and Probation Training Centre (PPTC) and the Faculty of Law of Tbilisi State University, a non-profit legal entity called the Prison Study Centre was established. It unites scientists and practitioners working in the fields of penitentiaries and probation.

In January 2012 a new scientific research union, the Davit Batonishvili Institute of Law, was established at the initiative of TSU students, PhDs and Professors, united in the Georgian Society of Young Scientists. Presently the Davit Batonishvili Institute of Law is the most important young researchers union in the South Caucasus with the objective of implementing educational and scientific projects in the field of law.