The programme delves into law, ethics, and economics to address Sustainable Development Goals. It examines legal boundaries, redefines social well-being and distributive justice, and designs multi-level institutions for sustainability. It explores strategic litigation, economic analysis, and collective rational choice models to promote institutional change and social norms conformity.

Despite the urgency of the Sustainable Development Goals integrated into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, some of the most influential global actors continue to disclaim their responsibility to contribute to them. The magnitude of the problem justifies a multidisciplinary research program on the institutions for sustainability based on putting to work together law, ethics and economics - and to which the LEES doctorate is dedicated.

The legal system defines the rule of law as limits to the political balance between fundamental rights and economic stability and indicates the intolerability of phenomena of marginalization and inequality.
However, new ideas of justice are needed: after redefining the concept of social well-being, these ideas need to reconceive and understand distributive justice from both an inter-generational and intra-generational perspective.

Comparative studies, as well as de jure condendo ones, will design multi-level institutions for sustainable development, finally questioning that various private institutions can be sheltered from the claims of social justice, such as the access to innovation, the fair distribution of decision-making rights to stakeholders within enterprises, the democratic self-government of common goods.

Strategic litigation will be studied in order to promote institutional change and respect for human rights inside and outside the courts.

Economic analysis will set the condition to verify when institutional change is supported by collective rational choice models and if it corresponds, thanks also to the plasticity of preferences, to the emergence of game theoretical equilibria eliciting conformity (social norms).