Latest blog articles

  • The US government is breaching its obligation to promote universal respect for human rights by cutting back on its contribution to UNRWA for aid to Palestinian refugees. Other states have extraterritorial human rights obligations to compensate for this reduction.

  • Fred Rodell, the once revered Yale Law School professor and the “bad boy of American legal academia” wrote that “[t]here are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” His harrowing words acutely capture my conflicting relationship with (legal)...

  • When a court invalidates an agreement because the rules of contract law were violated, then that agreement is deemed to have never existed. It was never valid and never will be valid. Aside from a few exceptions, everything that has already been performed under the agreement must be undone.

  • The biggest challenge of the 21st century is undoubtedly the question of how to tackle the effects of a rising population, expanding industrialisation and growing environmental degradation. Apart from an ever complex world, there are externalities that are the result of the way humankind has been...

  • Public authority increasingly relies on private standards and corporations’ due diligence processes in the regulation of sustainability and human rights in global value chains. How can it ensure that private actors driven by economic considerations are trustworthy in the regulation of their value...

  • Julia Reda, the only representative of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament, delivered the lecture “Copyright Showdown” at the Faculty of Law and explained how two controversial articles in the proposal might undermine the long-awaited EU copyright reform.

  • Sofia Ranchordas (University of Groningen) and Catalina Goanta (Maastricht University) have been awarded a Flexible Grant for Small Groups by the Independent Social Research Foundation (UK) for their project “DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Marketing: Regulating Social Media Influencers’.

  • Concluded at the end of 2015, the European Union-Vietnam FTA (EVFTA) has marked a successive breakthrough for the EU in exporting its long-standing sui generis protection of geographical indications (GIs). With respect to the scope of protection, the GI chapter in EVFTA has introduced a peculiar...

  • Public-private partnerships on the local level can succeed only if this new drive toward responsible data use in US cities and localities is here to stay. But as new technologies are eroding the famed anonymity of city life, are our cities becoming also final bastions of privacy protections? 

  • 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.