Dean’s blog episode 5: innovation from the bottom-up

As a student, I was a fan of the writings of Adriaan Pitlo (1901-1987), professor of law at the University of Amsterdam. Pitlo wrote in a light-hearted way, placed the law in a cultural context and liked to provoke. I was not used to any of this at my own university in Leiden. On one point, however, I never really understood Pitlo. He argued that jurists are conservative by nature: if the aim of the law is to keep society stable, jurists should not aim for change. But law and the administration of justice have many purposes, and most of these can profit from innovation. This is even more evident in case of legal research and teaching: law faculties not aiming for ways to do things better, run the risk of becoming irrelevant. This is why our Faculty attaches great importance to innovation from the bottom-up. We grow by tapping into the ideas of individual colleagues and groups. This is also the message the Faculty Board tried to convey in our new strategic programme Creative Community Law@UM that can be found here. Everyone is invited to react until 19 March.

A wonderful example of innovation from the bottom-up is the rethinking justice hackathon organised on 3 and 4 March on the Brightlands smart services campus in Heerlen. Thanks to the great efforts of Catalina Goanta and volunteers of Technolawgeeks 12 teams of students, together with their coaches, worked for 24 hours on topics like social justice, e-commerce conflicts, data-driven justice and courts of the future. The four winning teams, including many students of our own Faculty, came up with creative solutions at the intersection of law and technology. For example, one team made an online artificial intelligence mediation tool for eBay. Another team coded a machine-learning algorithm that predicts the sentence for juvenile criminals. These results are not only creative, but can also be applied by participating companies and institutions. The hackathon is a fantastic initiative that not only deserves to be used more as a means of teaching, but also shows how innovation of law can come from our own bachelor-students.

Another wonderful initiative took place on 3 March in Maastricht: the third edition of the Abraham de Pinto client counseling competitie organised by Fokke Fernhout and his team. The teams from the Netherlands and Flanders all did very well, but the prize was won by our very own Maastricht team consisting of Laurens de Vor and Lotte Kerstges.
The Faculty is proud of our winners, whom we congratulate very much!
 

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