Maastricht Students discuss Law of the Future in The Hague

One of my activities on the HiiL Visiting Chair on the Internationalisation of Law is teaching a course on The Law of the Future. This year the course, that is also part of an initiative on Maastricht Research Based Learning (MARBLE), attracted eight students from the Maastricht Faculty of Law and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Our focus is on the emerging law market and on the role of legal information in a globalising world. The course culminated in a small conference on 25 May organised by the students at which they presented their research and received comments from experts they had invited to take part. There was a wide variety of topics, ranging from online dispute resolution (Anne Hartl), the role of information in choice of law (Jonas Hinrichsen), private regulation (Nils Rüter), security rights (Agnieszka Kilanowska), family law (Daniela Heerdt), an international market for criminal law (Christina Kosin) to corporate social responsibility (Christina Gruber and Esther Kim). However, the link between these topics came out in all presentations and discussion: how can we achieve the traditional functions of law at the national level also at the global level? The quality of presentations and debate was high and I thoroughly enjoyed this meeting that was not inferior to a ‘real’ academic conference. A student-edited book containing all papers will come out in cooperation between HiiL and Maastricht University in the autumn of 2012. Meanwhile, HiiL continues thinking about the law of the future.