Latest blog articles

Last week we welcomed a large number of first year students at our Faculty. At the beginning of this new academic year, we were also very happy to host our alumni at the annual alumni day.

At the annual Faculty awayday the new Faculty Innovation Prize was awarded. This brings a new tradition to life.

While the internationalisation of higher education is under pressure in the Netherlands, legal education is an example of how a language policy can be successful: dependent on the aim and contents of the curriculum, lawyers can also be taught in other languages than their own.

Many things go well in Dutch legal academia. However, there is a need for legal academics to be more visible to the outside world. They should show why law must have a central place in the big research themes of today.

On 14 March the Faculty Council gave its consent to the new Faculty strategy ‘Creative Community Law@UM.’ The Faculty Board wishes to involve the Faculty community as much as possible also in implementing this strategy.

The University is dependent on innovation from the bottom-up. Recent examples of wonderful initiatives are the Rethinking Justice Hackathon and the Abraham de Pinto client counseling competition.

Now that law gets little attention in high school, we must enhance our initiatives in the field of pre-academic experience.

Many things happened at the Faculty in the past fortnight. Friday 26 January, we celebrated the 42^nd Dies Natalis of the UM. The one thing I always like about this celebration is that it is enormously varied compared to other universities’ anniversaries.

Legal craftsmanship is no longer the same as being a master of law. One of the challenges we face as a faculty, is how to design our teaching in such a way that our graduates have the skills to work until 2068.

Some colleagues asked me what it is that a dean does all day and why he cannot simply do his fair share of teaching. This question is fully justified and this blog will try to give some insight into work and life of a dean (that, by the way, I am also curious about myself).