Gijs van Dijck (G.)

Gijs van Dijck is professor of Private Law, Digitalization, and Legal AI. He tinkers with data, artificial intelligence, and empirical and data-driven methods, because sometimes, the best way to understand law is to measure how weird it really is. His mission: Help understand whether and how machines can help humans interpret, apply, and evaluate the law.

Gijs' papers have wandered into prestigious journals like the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. They somehow survived. He has shared his ideas at places like Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Cornell, and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. In the classroom, Gijs has been known to unleash chaos and curiosity through courses on torts, contracts, property, empirical legal research, and computational legal research. 

At Maastricht University, Gijs leads the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab, a merry band of legal thinkers and computer scientists who believe that data can dance with doctrine if you play the right tune. He is also a Principal Investigator at the Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS), where he keeps poking the boundaries of what law and technology can do before someone tells him to stop.