Projects and initiatives
Our faculty encourages researchers to develop their own research projects and initiatives within the contours set by the faculty’s research programme. This way we support an open academic debate and the exchange of ideas.
Research projects
CoCoDa
The CoCoDa project responds to growing concerns around the societal harms created by large online platforms. These harms include the spread of hateful or misleading content, the emergence of filter bubbles that reinforce polarisation, and serious threats to user privacy.
Over the next four years, the project will explore and develop integrated “technolegal” tools that combine computational access methods (like scraping, reverse engineering, or data donation) with legal mechanisms such as those introduced by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and similar reforms elsewhere.
Coordinated by Gijs van Dijck and Konrad Kollnig.
Visit the project website.
CHAINLAW
CHAINLAW aims to develop a novel conceptual and normative legal language for the socio-economic phenomenon of Global Value Chains (GVCs). The projects develops law of GVCs by taking a distinct approach to GVCs and studies them both in their industrial origin as well as in the recent spill-over of the concept into the digital sphere.
Coordinated by Anna Beckers.
Visit the project website.
MILE
The Jean Monnet Chair in EU Migration Law and Governance aims to create a spirit of interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, and societal awareness in the study of migration. It encompasses teaching, research, and public activities and debates. It targets national and international students, young leaders, stakeholders, and leading scholars with the purpose of generating interdisciplinary knowledge, critical understandings, and actionable research.
Coordinated by Lilian Tsourdi.
Visit the project website.
COMCRIM
COMCRIM is an interdisciplinary research project that studies crimes that undermine democracy and the rule of law (rechtsstaat-ondermijnende criminaliteit or ondermijning) in and via the Netherlands.
Coordinated by Jill Coster van Voorhout.
Visit the project website.
SoftEn
By combining rigorous socio-legal analysis with original empirical research, SoftEn opens the “black box” of enforcement in EU migration law. It sheds light on the implications of these new developments to ensure that soft enforcement strengthens compliance, enhances accountability, and safeguards fundamental rights.
Coordinated by Lilian Tsourdi.
Visit the project website.
EmergEU
EmergEU explores how the EU has responded to past crises and emergencies and assesses potential legal and policy changes to enhance the EU’s resilience. In doing so, EmergEU leverages the well-established CERiM network, which brings together lawyers, political scientists, social scientists, economists, and historians.
Coordinated by Andrea Ott.
Visit project website.
Collaborative projects
The Science Committee of the Faculty of Law annually awards collaborative innovative projects with funding. Collaborative projects encourage researchers to break away from the confines of their institute, group or discipline, and to conduct interdisciplinary research with other researchers from within or outside the faculty.
Building Institutional Capacity to Tackle Environmental Crime Dr. Giulia Giardi (Maastricht University) and Dr. Kim Geurtjens (Avans Hogeschool)
In this project involves a series of foundational interviews with practitioners in the field of waste management, namely administrative and criminal law enforcement agents.
This research ultimately serves the need to improve the fight against environmental crime starting with the waste sector, which is the source of immense pollution. By strengthening institutions, we can buttress environmental protection and decrease public health hazards. Enforcement in the waste sector (in the Netherlands) is still highly problematic, and the level and quality of enforcement are criminogenic in nature. Without prompt improvement, we will be dealing with mounting pollution of over the years to come.
MobilityJustice 4.0 Dr. Marta K. Kołacz, Dr. Hannes Westermann and Dr. Jerry Spanakis
This projects aims to establish a new interdisciplinary research line at the crossroads of EU passenger law, comparative legal analysis, and computer science, focused on enforcing EU passenger rights. This field is currently dominated by doctrinal and law-and-economics approaches.
The team will conduct a pilot study called 'Rights-on-Rail' which focuses on rail passenger rights. This study aims at a prototype of an automated tool to help passengers navigate their rights during sudden disruptions (e.g. delays, cancellations), when railway companies often struggle to communicate timely guidance. This tool will be achieved through creation of relevant databases including rail operators terms and conditions, and connecting them with possible rail journeys. The pilot will also explore how algorithmic methods and cross-jurisdictional legal insights can jointly enhance the understanding and enforcement of passenger rights across Europe and thus allows us to create new methodological approaches that can be later used by the research community.
Societally, the pilot study explores how AI can help enforcing passenger rights across complex rail journeys. Scientifically, it addresses a neglected area: passenger rights in de rail sector.
Research initiatives
Research initiatives are projects, activities, or collaborative groups that do not formally fall under an existing research institute or research group. They bring together researchers from different institutes who share a common interest in a specific area of law or in interdisciplinary approaches to law.
Law and Popular Culture Research Network
The Law and Popular Culture Research Network (LPC-RN) is a research initiative that brings together activities focused on the intersection of law and popular culture.
Visit the LPC-RN website.
