Latest blog articles

Opening speech Opening Academic Year 2019-2020

The purpose of the opening of the academic year is to project optimism and discussing the way ahead. This is more  difficult this year as we have experienced or expecting some dramatic changes to the higher education landscape in the Netherlands. First...

This summer we have witnessed the birth of the “European university”. In June, the European Commission announced the 17 successful bids for this status from consortia of institutions across the continent. Given that UK universities are among the best in the world, you would have expected them to be...

I wrote my PhD towards the last days of the debate over “social rights”. This debate harkens back to the fifties, when the International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights was being negotiated. Some claimed that social rights could never be true rights. Others claimed that without social rights...

“What kind of skills do we want our graduates to have?” was the main topic of discussion during a recent staff meeting, which got me thinking.

As the faculty of law, perhaps the “right” answer would entail something along the lines of: “Our graduates need to be capable of arguing logically, writing...

In this entry I want to mention four considerations that suggest that human rights lawyers should be cautious in embracing basic income as a replacement for human rights. These reflections should be seen as merely exploratory. The basic income in full has never been put in practice, and consequently...

To speak of economic justice today is to speak of the basic income. A basic income can be defined as an unconditional cash payment to all persons who form part of a political community. As automation increases, there is fear that labor will be replaced by “robots”. The basic income seems to be a...

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)...

Trevor Burrus claims that health care cannot be a fundamental right. He is not alone in saying this, but the way he says it is noteworthy. His article is not original (nor does it claim to be), but it represents an admirably clear retelling of an old story: Positive rights cannot be rights, this is...

Should Uber be considered as a company that offers transportation services or rather as a digital platform that offers information society services, operating merely to match passengers with drivers?

Football for sale: what is the problem, and what are the solutions? Read our previous reports (Spain, England, Germany and the Netherlands) to find out.