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VSR-VWR Symposium: Vulnerability and the Law - Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Symposium
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From climate breakdown and algorithmic bias to shrinking social safety nets – vulnerability is a defining feature of our time. Yet while the concept is widely used in legal and policy debates, its meanings, applications, and implications are anything but straightforward. Who defines vulnerability? How does it shape legal responses, access to justice, and institutional reform? And how can law respond meaningfully to vulnerability in an age of environmental crisis, digital transformation, and disrupted welfare state?

On Friday 14 November 2025, the symposium Vulnerability and the Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives will take place in Maastricht. The event is organised by The Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law (VWR) and the Dutch-Flemish Law & Society Association (VSR), and is hosted by the Maastricht Centre for Law & Jurisprudence (MCLJ).

This one-day symposium brings together scholars working across disciplines to explore how vulnerability functions as a concept, a condition, and a call to action in legal research and practice. It includes both legal-philosophical inquiries – examining how vulnerability challenges dominant ideas of autonomy, rights, and justice – and socio-legal approaches that investigate how legal systems structure, mitigate, or exacerbate vulnerability and lived experiences of precarity and exclusion. 

The symposium includes a keynote, a living library social event, and parallel presentations on one of the following themes: Vulnerability and Climate Change, Vulnerability and Digitalisation, Vulnerability and the Responsive State.

Programme

11:00Registration & coffee/tea
11:30Welcome by Prof. Dr. Roland Pierik, Chair of the Maastricht Centre for Law & Jurisprudence, UM Faculty of Law
 Introduction by Anna Pivaty, Radboud University (RU) Law School & VSR Board Member and Maarten Stremler, UM Faculty of Law, WVR Board Member 
 Keynote address ‘Interrogating Vulnerability: Legal Discourses on Abortion Through a Public Health Lens’ by Prof. Fiona de Londras, Barber Professor of Jurisprudence, Birmingham Law School (UK)
 Discussion
12:30VWR-PhD dissertation award ceremony
12:45Lunch
13:30A ‘Living Library’ (social activity)
Organised in close collaboration with the UM Inclusivity & Diversity Office
 Engage in a series of 15-minute personal conversation with a ‘living book’ (volunteers from the UM community and beyond, who have faced prejudice and misunderstanding due to their condition or life situation). Learn how they live vulnerability, and how they experience contacts with the law & the state. 
14:30Parallel sessions 
 

Session 1. Vulnerability and Climate Change

  • ‘Energy Poverty - Defining Vulnerability in the Energy Transition’

    Laura Kaschny, UM Faculty of Law

  • ‘Utopia Meets Catastrophe: A Genre Gap Between International Human Rights Law and Climate Change’ 

    Yuliia Khyzhniak, University of Groningen (NL)       

  • ‘1.5°C to Stay Alive’: Mitigation Scenarios, Climate Vulnerability, and the Global Temperature Target’

    Laura Mai, Tilburg University (NL)      

  • ‘Understanding mobility and eco-eco vulnerability’

    Samuel Ballin, Radboud University

  • ‘The risks of risk: The dilemmas and threats of regulating areas at risk from climate change in Mozambique’ 

    Bernardo Ribeiro de Almeida & Carolien Jacobs, Leiden University (NL)   

  • ‘Paris Is Not Enough: Climate Vulnerability, Legal Uncertainty, and the Limits of the CSDDD’

    Xandra Bachus, University of Twente (NL)    

 

Session 2. Vulnerability and Digitalisation

  • ‘RESOCIAL: Vulnerability on Social Media’ 

    Manon Carrere and Maria Lucia Rebrean, Leiden University (NL) 

  • ‘When “Access” Becomes Exposure: AI Campaigning and Women’s Electoral Vulnerability in India’ 

    Shilpi Pandey, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)

  • ‘Administrative Procedure in the Automated Age’ Anne Spijkstra, Tilburg University (NL)
  • ‘The consequences of digitalisation for access to justice: voices of the vulnerable’ Tracey Varnava, University of Kent (UK)

  • ‘The vulnerable consumer in the context of cybersecurity under the Cyber Resilience Act’

    Mattis van ’t Schip, Radboud University

  • ‘The double-edged sword of digitalisation: vulnerabilities created by the eIDAS 2.0 regulation under the quantum threat’

    Patrycja Wirkowska, Utrecht University

             

 

Session 3. Vulnerability and the Responsive State

  • ‘Anticipated care and governmental support in old age: A vulnerability-theoretical perspective on the expectations of 38 voluntarily childless adults in the Netherlands’ 

    Nola Cammu, Tilburg University 

  • ‘Dead Language Society, A reflection on vulnerability and the language of the law in light of Philippe Claudel’s Novel The Tree in the land of the Toraja (2016)’

    Carinne Elion-Valter, Erasmus University Rotterdam  (NL) 

  • ‘The homely hearing. Towards tailored administrative law hearings for vulnerable objectors’ 

    Arnt Mein, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (NL)        

  • ‘Comparing the Vulnerability Reasonings of the ECtHR and IACtHR on Housing and Homelessness’ Matej Sedlar, University of Groningen   

  • ‘Reaching vulnerable people: building the bridge from their end’ 

    Laura van de Grint & Julia van den Brink, The Knowledge Centre Legal Aid System (Kenniscentrum Stelsel Gesubsidieerde Rechtsbijstand)

 

16:00Reception

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