L.E.M. Ritzen
Research profile
Laurie Ritzen's research focuses primarily on Dutch criminal law, examining how the national criminal justice system responds to evolving societal and technological challenges. Her work combines doctrinal legal analysis with empirical insights from criminal justice practice and, where relevant, situates developments within a broader European legal context. Her research is structured around three interconnected lines: (i) digital and economic crime, with a particular focus on crypto-assets and new forms of offending; (ii) differential effects of criminal law, analysing how criminal law operates across different groups and contexts; and (iii) autonomy, responsibility and criminal liability, exploring questions related to fundamental concepts of criminal law and the boundaries of criminalisation.
She is currently co-leading, together with Suzan van der Aa, a research project funded by the Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek- en Documentatiecentrum (WODC) examining how femicide is recognised and legally assessed in Dutch criminal law practice.
Research projects
Femicide in de Nederlandse rechtspraktijk: juridische erkenning en straftoemeting
Researchers: Laurie Ritzen & Suzan van der Aa (co-coordinators & authors); Christina Peristeridou, Alice Giannini, Camila Ugaz Heudebert, Elvira Loibl & Johannes Keiler (co-authors). With help of Floortje Stijnen & Cristian Rusu (student-assistants)
Funding institution: WODC
Duration: 10 months (publication 12 May)
Short description: Commissioned research project (funded by WODC), involving research methods such as: desk research, case law review; interviews with practitioners and legal scholars; vignette study (public prosecutors and judges); legal comparative study (involving Cyprus, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Malta, Portugal and Austria).
The aim of this project is to research how ‘femicide’ or the gender-related killing of a woman or girl is currently dealt with in Dutch criminal law practice. Although ‘femicide’ is not a legal concept in the Netherlands, we aim to see if Dutch legal practice shows signs of explicit or implicit recognition and acknowledgement of the concept nonetheless and whether the fact that a case that could be qualified as ‘femicide’ impacts sentencing. With the help of research methods such as a desk research, quantitative case law review, interviews with practitioners and legal scholars, a vignette study, a legal comparative study (Malta, Italy, Cyprus, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Portugal) we aim to answer the following central research question:
To what extent is femicide recognized, acknowledged, framed and legally assessed in Dutch legal practice, and to what extent are gender-related aspects used in the legal assessment and sentencing of cases involving (attempted) murder and manslaughter of women?