PhD Platform

The VWR want to increase the visibility of PhD students who conduct legal-theoretical research in the Netherlands and Belgium. By giving them special attention on the website, the VWR hopes their research will reach a larger audience and makes it easier for young researchers to contact colleagues who work in a similar field.

Below is an overview of PhD students in the field of legal theory. If you want to be added to the list, feel free to contact us.

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Maurits Helmich
Lester Chen

KU Leuven

Christophe Maes
Bas Leijssenaar

Tilburg University

Beira Aguilar Rubiano
Lukasz Dziedzic
David Hernández Zambrano
I.A. (Ivan Alexander) Mahecha Bustos
Carl Emilio Lewis
Claudia Quelle​
Chiara Raucea
J. C. (Jorge) Restrepo Ramos
Umberto Mario Sconfienza

Leiden University

C.G. (Reina) Brouwer
Erwin Dijkstra
Gert Jan Geling
Mirjam Heldmann
Jan Storm

Maastricht University

Craig Eggett

University of Groningen

Kostiantyn V. Gorobets
Hylke Jellema
Yuliia V. Khyzhniak

Utrecht University

Niels Graaf
Pauline Phoa
Jim Waasdorp

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Lisette ten Haaf
Laura Henderson

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Maarten Colette
Marco in ‘t Veld

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Maurits Helmich

Faculty: Erasmus School of Law
Supervisor(s): Wibren van der Burg (promotor) and Lonneke Poort (co-promotor)
(Preliminary) title of research:“Constitutional Law, Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Argument. How Legal Scholars and Theorists Can Contribute to Normative Constitutional Debates.”
Summary: Normative questions on what constitutional principles ought to govern law are as much the topic of academic conversation as they are of public debate. Unhappily enough, however, there is no specific specialization in such applied constitutional theory. Constitutional scholars are excellent students of specific doctrines of constitutional law, but lack a clear methodology in reflecting on it. Legal philosophers, on the other hand, often have trouble taking the specific constitutional context into account. My project aims to bridge this gap, and studies ways in which constitutional scholars and legal philosophers can use a shared framework for normative constitutional evaluation.
Expected end date: September 2021.

Lester Chen

Faculty: Erasmus School of Law
Supervisor(s): Wibren van der Burg
(Preliminary) title of research: The appropriate concept of toleration in the multicultural society
Summary: Toleration is always a common answer for people who want to solve conflicts and disagreements in history. However, several issues about this elusive concept are still under debate, including its meaning, justification and limitation. Besides, some argue that toleration is not satisfied enough for accommodating diversity since it leads to a society with indifference or it is unable to eliminate discrimination and suppression. In this research, I attempt to provide a careful reflection on these problems and to defend toleration as an appropriate answer for us in a multicultural society.
Expected end date: september 2022

KU Leuven

Christophe Maes

Faculty: Faculty of Law, Institute for Constitutional Law
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Stefan Sottiaux (supervisor), Prof. Dr. Raf Geenens (co-supervisor)
(Preliminary) title of research: The notion of sovereignty in the Belgian Constitution of 1831. A legal historical research on the role of sovereingty in the organisation of the Belgian state power.
Summary: The Belgian Constitution states that “All powers stem from the Nation” (art. 33). This formulation is supposed to refer to the notion of national sovereignty, as opposed to the notion of popular sovereignty. This generally accepted interpretation rules out instruments of direct democracy. Yet the question arises whether the current conception of sovereignty corresponds to the actual intention of the Belgian constituent of 1830-31. My research’s purpose is to answer this question by means of an interdisciplinary analysis (both historical and legal) of the conception of sovereignty endorsed by the Belgian ‘founding fathers’.
Expected end date: November 2019

Bas Leijssenaar

Faculty and university: Centre for Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (FWO fellow).
Supervisor(s): Raf Geenens (supervisor), Stefan Sottiaux (co-supervisor)
(Preliminary) title of research: Towards a pluralist model of constituent power
Summary: The idea that power belongs to the people could hardly be more topical. In the 18^th century, it was expressed in the concept of constituent power, which indicates the competence of the people to determine their constitutional order. Recently, this concept has resurfaced in debates on the democratization of constitutional change and the legitimacy of supranational institutions. Yet the meaning and implications of the concept in these discussions remains ambiguous. While legal scholars believe that constituent power can only be exercised through institutions (elections, courts, assemblies, referendums), political philosophers argue that it should precisely challenge existing institutions without being restrained by them. At the same time, constituent power’s historical reliance on the idea of a unified popular will is at odds with contemporary, more pluralist, ways of thinking about sources of legitimacy (the people, human rights, global justice, etc.).
My aim is therefore to develop an understanding of constituent power in the form of a pluralist model, which no longer relies on a monolithic source of legitimacy, but draws from a plurality of different sources, and conceives of different ‘modes’ of constituent power – mass demonstrations, courtrooms, assemblies, etc. – as complementary ways of providing legitimacy in democratic processes. This model will offer new approaches to concrete debates about constitutional change and supranational institutions.
Expected end date of research: August 2021

Universiteit Tilburg

Beira Aguilar Rubiano

Faculty: Legal Philosophy Research group, Law Faculty
Supervisors: Bert van Roermund, Hans Lindahl and Wilson Herrera
(Preliminary) title of research: Which Democracy, Which Citizenship, Which Justice? The Challenges of Transitional Justice.
Summary: My research addresses the limits of the paradigmatic reparation approach in Transitional Justice – one centered on the restitution of rights, particularly the property right – to victims of land dispossession and forced displacement, in the context of a violent conflict. This approach to rights restitution has a narrow and biased view of peasants’ relationships with the land, which in turn is expressed in narrow conceptions of citizenship, democracy, and justice, and introduces tensions in the Transitional Justice objectives. In my project, I try to articulate the rights and the capabilities approaches in order to face the limitations of the former.
Expected end date : October 2018

Lukasz Dziedzic

Faculty: Tilburg Law School
Supervisor(s): Prof. Hans Lindahl en Prof. Conny Rijken
(Preliminary) title of research: The Principle of Solidarity and Fair Sharing of Responsibility in the Common European Asylum System
Summary: Although a language of solidarity and fair sharing is present throughout the legal provisions of the Common European Asylum System, there are no clear definitions as to its factual meaning and the assumption that it amounts to no more than rhetorics could easily be made. Should it be understood solely as a principle of distributive justice that aims at helping Member States in distributing the ‘burdens’ of protection seeker flows fairly amongst each other or does it entail more? Does this principle only encompass solidarity between MS or should it also extend to individual protection seekers, and what is the difference between internal solidarity and fairness to the outside world? These and other questions will be tackled in this research.
Expected end date: September 2019

David Hernández Zambrano

Faculty: Tilburg Law School
Supervisors: Dr. Hans Lindahl, Dr. Wilson Herrera, Dr. Daniel Augenstein
(Preliminary) title research: Justice, sovereignty, and globalization: the perils and opportunities for social rights
Summary: The question I want to address in the thesis is to which extent is there a justifiable international obligation to fulfill social and economic rights across borders, especially for the poorest population in third world countries. Rather than making a statement of principles of global justice, the focus of the project is to analyze the possibility of justifying an obligation of redistribution across borders in order to protect social and economic rights, focusing on the philosophical reflection about distributive justice and on the correlation between justice and institutional legitimacy.
Expected end date: February 2019

Carl Emilio Lewis

Faculty: Department of European and International Public Law
Supervisors: Prof. Hans Lindahl, Prof. Emilios Christodoulidis en Prof. Nikolas Rajkovic
(Preliminary) title research: Public International Law: Between the Universal and the Common
Summary: My research concerns the well-known doctrinal debate between those who argue that certain norms of public international law can (and do) reflect universal values, and those who criticise such claims and their inevitable furtherance of some form of cultural hegemony. With a specific focus on the international human rights regime, my research seeks to apply philosophical enquiries made into the notions by which these claims are both variously defended and criticised (values, norms, and crucially, the concept of the universal), so to answer my thesis question: Can international law ever be considered universal, without succumbing to the imperialist critique?
Expected end date:Summer 2018

I.A. (Ivan Alexander) Mahecha Bustos

Faculty: Tilburg Law School
Supervisors H.K. (Hans) Lindahl; D.H (Daniel) Augenstein; C. (Camila) de Gamboa
(Preliminary) title research:  Political (In)tolerance in Conflict
Summary: The PhD research enquires about the meaning of labelling the extermination of the political party La Union Patriótica as ‘extreme political intolerance’ and the possible responses from an account of political tolerance suitable for contexts of deep political polarization as the one presented in Colombia. In order to provide answers, the dissertation relies on the philosophical understanding of the concepts of tolerance and intolerance and the contemporary theoretical approaches to such concepts from liberal, democratic, recognitional, and critical theories. Facing the insufficiency of the analyzed accounts to tackle the problem posed by the case study, the dissertation argues for a responsive account of political tolerance (which I label as ‘radical’ or ‘transitional’), which enables the emergence of liberal and democratic orders. As a result, the dissertation will provide practical applications for the Colombian situation at legal, political, and moral contexts.
Expected end date: August 2017

Claudia Quelle​

Faculty: ​ Tilburg Law School
Supervisors: Ronald Leenes, Bert van Roermund​
(Preliminary) title research: The risk-based approach to the protection of fundamental rights in the General Data Protection Regulation (preliminary)​
Summary: This research project concerns the risk-based approach in the General Data Protection Regulation. This approach entails, in short, that the applicable legal obligations are substantiated and calibrated with a view to the risks posed by the data processing operation to the rights and freedoms at stake. It can therefore be contrasted with a rule-based approach, as it is characterized instead by the conferral of decisional competence onto the norm-addressees of the law. It also differs from an approach to data processing which focuses on individual consent and, more generally, on informational self-determination. I am particularly interested in the relation between the risk-based approach and the objective of the GDPR to protect the fundamental rights of natural persons.
Expected end date: September 2019​

Chiara Raucea

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisors: Bert van Roermund, Daniel Augenstein
(Preliminary) title research:  Citizenship inverted: from rights to status?
Summary: The provisional title of my dissertation is: ‘Citizenship inverted: from rights to status?’ Already in the title, the qualification of citizenship as ‘inverted’ has the purpose of signalling the most significant contribution that I want to make with my work in the field of citizenship studies: I want to challenge the traditional account of citizenship, according to which formal political membership is a necessary premise to the distribution of citizenship rights. My research project is an enquiry concerning specifically European citizenship rights. However, its findings can shed light on the relation between formal political membership and enjoyment of citizenship rights beyond the specific context of the European Union
Expected end date:  January 2018

J. C. (Jorge) Restrepo Ramos

Faculty: Tilburg Law School
Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. Hans Lindahl and Prof. Dr. Emilios Christodoulidis
(Preliminary) title of research: The binding character of the law – a case for putative decisionism
Summary: My thesis aims to state that the so-called binding force of the law is a belief had by the subjects involved in a legal system and is not an actual form of deontic power of the norms of the law. However, given the embedding of these beliefs in the political self-understanding of a given group of persons and in other beliefs that work as a meaning-enhancing network to the former, the binding character of the law appears as the backbone of a form of putative decisionism, according to which legal systems are held to be an authoritative and willed creation.
Expected end date: October 2017

Umberto Mario Sconfienza

Faculty: Department of European and International Public Law – Research Group of Legal Theory
Supervisor(s): Hans Lindahl, Daniel Augenstein, George Pavlakos
(Preliminary) title of research: Exploring the complexities of market-based environmental policies through a meso-level approach to policy analysis.
Summary: Market-based climate mitigation policies are often touted as promising attempts to solve environmental problems which are otherwise resistant to resolution.  Often, these policies aim to introduce the logic of the market into social settings where this logic is largely uncommon. As a consequence, conflicts among the various people involved in implementing these policies are likely to develop.  My work tries to explain these conflicts and deals with these issues from the point of view of a meso-level approach to policy analysis. This approach looks at the tensions among the normative presuppositions which inform and form the basis of the environmental narratives usually employed to analyse and propose solutions to environmental problems.
Expected end date: June 2017

Universiteit Leiden

C.G. (Reina) Brouwer

Faculty: Encyclopedie van de Rechtswetenschap, Faculteit of law
Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. P. B. Cliteur
(Preliminary) title of research: The Power of Tragedy and the Tragedy of Power
Summary: This thesis attempts to unravel the essential message of Shakespearean tragedy in view of the development of the philosophy of law.
Research questions:
–           What essential characteristics make a tragedy a Shakespearean tragedy.
–           In what way is Shakespearean tragedy of importance for law.
Hypotheses:
–           Shakespeare is architect and bearer of a tragic-philosophical  paradigm, which has had and still has a great influence in law.
–           His interpretation of tragedy is pre-ethical; indicating the limits and bounds of human (im)perfection and defining the empirical fields within which the development of ethicality can be made possible.
–           His treatment of the violence paradigm within tragedy has had and still has an enormous influence on the development of ethicality in law.
Expected end date: Unknown

Erwin Dijkstra

Faculty: Department of Jurisprudence, Faculty of Law
Supervisor(s): prof. mr. P.B. Cliteur & mr. dr. A.J. Kwak
(Preliminary) title of research: Dialectic of Hope: Concerning Assumptions, Technocracy and the Silent Death of Controversy
Short summary (~100 words): The simple fact that our fundamental rights – both political and social – can be found in international treaties and most constitutions, does not guarantee that civilians can exercise or enjoy them in a meaningful way. Because the capability for such enjoyment and exercise is partly determined by the continuous developing interaction between the laws and regulations and social realty. This instability requires us to be critical towards the assumptions which are broadly accepted by lawgivers, policy makers and society at large. My research concerns the assumptions of technocracy – ‘apolitical’ government in accord with perceived necessities – and how they influence the functioning of fundamental rights.
Expected end date of research: August 2022

Gert Jan Geling

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisor(s): Paul Cliteur (Promotor), Gelijn Molier (Copromotor)
(Preliminary) title of research (NL): Ex-moslims, het verlaten van de islam en horizontale godsdienstvrijheid in Nederland
Summary (NL): Migratie tussen religies en het verlaten van een religie is een wijdverbreid fenomeen. Het komt op elk continent en binnen elke religie voor. In Nederland worden de vrijheden en rechten van diegene die een religie verlaat d.m.v. (internationale) wetgeving gegarandeerd. Echter, diegene die de islam verlaten, zogeheten ‘ex-moslims’, ondervinden in veel gevallen (ernstige) beperkingen bij het verlaten van de islam. Er is in Nederland een (groeiende) groep ex-moslims, die echter weinig aanwezig zijn in het publieke debat. Dit onderzoek handelt over in hoeverre je in Nederland als ex-moslim vrij bent om (openlijk) je religie te verlaten, en wat dit zegt over hoe het gesteld is met de (horizontale) godsdienstvrijheid in Nederland.
Expected end date: 2023

Mirjam Heldmann

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisor(s): Paul Cliteur (promotor) and Elham Manea (copromotor)
(Preliminary) title of research: Legal Pluralism from a Gender Perspective: A  Study on the Integration of Islamic Law in Germany
Summary: The political significance of the integration religious minorities is a hotly debated issue. How are women affected when a state applies more than one legal system? This study focuses on legal pluralism, the integration of different legal systems within one state, a phenomenon observable in our modern multicultural states. First, it introduces legal pluralism as a theory together with its key thinkers, which brings varying aspects of legal pluralism into the discourse and contrasts them with legal centralism at the opposite end of the spectrum. Secondly, it employs qualitative research methods to analyse normative claims through open end in-depth interviews with Turkish Muslim women and men in Germany. Qualitative, open end interviews will aim to identify how Islamic law might be applied in Germany and how this is experienced by Turkish Muslim women. In the course of this research, I will arrange purposive expert sampling with community leaders and heads of their organisations/ foundations as well as with religious leaders.  The key question that will be addressed is whether greater introduction of various legal systems within one state contributes to possible gender discrimination.
Expected end date: 2021

Jan Storm

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisor: P.B. Cliteur
(Preliminary) title of research (NL): samen soeverein
Summary (NL): De Grondwet van 1814 bracht Nederland een minderheids-bestuurssysteem; en maakte dat onaantastbaar. Geleidelijk slopen politieke partijen binnen en werden oppermachtig. Partij-regenten bepalen nu de agenda en nemen alle beslissingen; gewone burgers mogen alleen om de paar jaar uit een aangeboden assortiment politieke partijen er één kiezen. De vertegenwoordigende democratie luistert intussen wèl naar carrière-motieven en lobby’s. Het is een systeem voor en door regenten. Door de tweedeling kreeg het land niet het beleid dat de burgers zich zouden wensen. Zij haakten af en werden calculerend. En dit terwijl statistieken tonen dat burgerzeggenschap leidt tot meer doelmatigheid, een betere belastingmoraal en minder schulden. Burgerzeggenschap is wat we nodig hebben.
Expected end date: medio 2018

 Universiteit Maastricht

Craig Eggett

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisor:​ Prof. Jure Vidmar
(Preliminary) title of research: A Conceptual Framework for the Application of General Principles of Law in the International Legal System
Summary: This project is concerned with the potential of “general principles of law” to operate as a tool in the conduct of international legal relations. It posits that fundamental conceptual confusion and uncertainty has resulted in the underuse of general principles as a source of international law. Accordingly, it seeks to advance a comprehensive theoretical framework for the interpretation of such principles and their application to current international legal problems.
Expected end date:: Spring 2020

University of Groningen

Universiteit Utrecht

Niels Graaf

Faculty: Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance
Supervisor(s): Elaine Mak en dr. mr. Jacobien van Dorp
(Preliminary) title of research: Judicial Ideologies and the Alignment of European Judicial Cultures
Summary: Scholarship concerning the dynamics of legal transfer is almost invariably focused on the ‘rules and decisions level’ of legal systems. Judicial Ideologies and the Alignment of European Judicial Cultures complements this often-invoked analysis by turning the perspective to judicial culture. To this end, this project focusses on the development of ‘judicial ideologies’, i.e. the collection of values which define the general direction of courts to the law in force, in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (1989-2020), and to what extent these align through the dynamics of ‘top-down’ development (EU harmonisation) and ‘bottom-up’ developments (legal borrowing). The analysis consists of the study of judicial ideologies in case law, legislation and legal scholarship from a comparative historical social science perspective.
Expected end date: January 2021

Pauline Phoa

Faculty: Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance
Supervisors: prof. S.A. de Vries (UU), prof. A.M.P. Gaakeer (EUR), dr. A. van den Brink (UU)
(Preliminary) title of research: EUmarkt en grondrechtenbescherming
Summary: Drawing on insights from hermeneutics and more, Single Market are balanced against fundamental rights. The main research question of my Ph.D thesis is: What are the adjudication?
Expected end date: July 2019

Jim Waasdorp

Faculty: Faculteit Recht, Economie, Bestuur en Organisatie
Supervisors: prof. E. Mak (UU) en mr. dr. J.C. de Wit (EUR)
(Preliminary) title of research (NL): Rechtsvinding door de bestuursrechter in het medisch bestuursrecht. Over rechterlijk beslissen in onzekerheid.
Summary (NL): In het medisch bestuursrecht is de gezondheidstoestand van de belanghebbende bepalend voor de uitkomst van de bestuursrechtelijke procedure. De bestuursrechter kan die gezondheidstoestand wegens het ontbreken van de noodzakelijke medische deskundigheid niet zelf beoordelen. Toch moet hij of zij een beslissing nemen. In dit onderzoek focus ik mij op het proces van rechtsvinding door de bestuursrechter in het medisch bestuursrecht. Ik combineer een rechtstheoretische invalshoek met een analyse van de in de cognitieve psychologie ontwikkelde beslismodellen en heuristieken.
Expected end date: January 2020

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Lisette ten Haaf

Faculty: Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid
Supervisor(s): Bart van Klink en Britta van Beers
(Preliminary) title of research: Deciding for the Future Child. How can Law represent a Non-existing Entity?
Summary: This research addresses the question how we can justify intervention in reproduction in order to prevent a certain type of child from coming into existence. The main focus lies on the current approach endorsed by most Western legal systems: appealing to the interests of the future child and assuming this child has an interest in its own non-existence. This research argues that this subject-oriented approach is not sufficiently equipped to offer a sound justification and proposes an alternative approach to justify the prevention of a child.
Expected end date: January 2018

Laura Henderson

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisors: Bart van Klink & Wouter Veraart
(Preliminary) title of research: Crisis in the Courtroom: Judicial Decision-Making in the European Union and the United States in Times of Crisis.
Summary: tba
Expected end date: Summer 2017

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Maarten Colette

Faculty: Faculty of Law
Supervisor: prof. dr. Paul De Hert
(Preliminary) title of research: Reconceptualising freedom and citizenship: Contextual responses towards its history, meaning and significance
Summary: This project aims at recalibrating normative ideas regarding freedom and citizenship. Notwithstanding recent reappraisal of these themes, they have not been treated with sufficient accuracy. Since the second half of the twentieth century two basic positions have been taken up with respect to both concepts – liberalism (freedom as sphere of non-interference) and republicanism (freedom as intrinsically valuable concept). Moreover, in recent years a ‘third conception’ of liberty came to the fore: freedom as non-domination. Quentin Skinner has labeled this view neo-Roman. This project will reassess all these views by way of legal-historical and discourse-analytical approaches. The culmination point will be the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau updated classical views on freedom, which were combined communitarian and individual, to bring them in line with societal circumstances of his time. Rousseau’s ideas will be confronted with the historical development of concepts that were neglected by such modernist authors as Hobbes and Locke and which date back to classical times (libertas, civitas). Rousseau’s thinking is particularly important for re-valuing freedom and citizenship today, since he blended forgotten strands of thought with Enlightenment views that still mark the foundations of present-day society.
Expected end date: September 2020

Marco in ‘t Veld

Faculty: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Faculteit Recht en Criminologie
Supervisor: Prof. dr. D. De ruysscher
(Preliminary) title of research: Cataloguing Customs of Trade: Looking Behind the Labels (Amsterdam and Lyon, 1700-1730)
Summary (NL): Het project gaat over de (informele) handelsgebruiken onder verschillende handelaren in Amsterdam en Lyon in het begin van de achttiende eeuw. De huidige literatuur over de lex mercatoria is sterk gericht op de middeleeuwen en is vooral gebaseerd op ‘rechtswetenschappelijke’ bronnen. Om de handelsgebruiken aan het licht te brengen wordt vooral gekeken naar rechtbank-gerelateerde documenten, zoals parreres, turben, adviezen en pleidooien. Het hoofddoel is om aan de hand van verwijzingen naar handelsgebruiken de visie van handelaren zélf uit deze bronnen te destilleren en aldus aan de opheldering van het diffuse karakter van het handelsgewoonterecht bij te dragen. Ten slotte zullen de resultaten uit Amsterdam en Lyon met elkaar vergeleken worden.
Expected end date: October 2020

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