Latest blog articles

In the last few months all colleagues were able to participate in a poll to name our tutorial rooms. This leads to a choice doing justice to diversity in nationality, field, gender and type of name.

Yesterday festive drinks were held at the occasion of opening the new Faculty Board Room and Alumni Wall. We also call upon everyone to help us name our tutorial rooms.

Last Friday the University celebrated its 43rd birthday. This was a wonderful and festive event for both the University and the Faculty. Four students received a prize for their thesis and Prof. Monica Claes presented Michael Ignatieff with a honorary doctorate.

Books remain important for legal scholars as a means to present their research. On 28 September a new Faculty book series was launched.

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.

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.

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.

One of the major achievements from European integration is the principle of mutual recognition. ^{(Dutch only)}

On 9 April 2011 a gunman killed 6 people in a shopping mall in the Dutch town of Alphen aan den Rijn. A group of victims now claims damages from the gunman’s parents, claiming that they should have prevented their son from this horrendous act.