MCLJ PhD Projects

Name: Eline Couperus
Project: Economic Freedom in a Social Europe
Supervisors: prof.dr. Roland Pierik, prof.dr. Sacha Gerben (Collège d’Europe), dr. Šejla Imamović (Maastricht Law School)
Description: The project questions the role of economic freedoms within the EU’s constitutional framework, particularly in relation to the emergence of a 'social Europe'. Specifically, it aims to analyse the implications of social justice principles on the interpretation and application of economic freedoms embedded in EU law. To this end, the research focuses on the evaluation of the freedom to conduct a business (Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union) as a fundamental economic liberty, adopting a legal-philosophical approach to critically assess its role and limitations to further the EU’s commitments to social justice.

Name: Adelheid van Luipen
Project: Questioning rights of nature for a more-than-human world
Supervisors: dr. Lukasz Dziedzic and prof.dr. Roland Pierik
Description: This project aims at contributing to a critical engagement with rights of nature by specifically questioning their potential to legally accommodate a more-than-human worldview in which the dichotomy between nature and humans, as a core feature of anthropocentric law, is left behind. The central case study of the research is a recent initiative to grant several fundamental rights and legal personhood to the river Maas (Meuse).

Name: Manon Moerman 
Project: Private Partnerships in early modern Amsterdam (17th – 18th centuries) 
Supervisors: prof.dr. Bram van Hofstraeten (Maastricht Law School) and prof.dr. Matthijs de Jong (Erasmus Law School) 
Description: This research aims to discover what the legal characteristics and organizational features were of Amsterdam’s early modern private partnerships and how these evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on notarized partnership contracts. These findings will then be compared to contemporaneous jurisprudence and legislation to examine if major discrepancies existed between the law in books, i.e. enacted or authoritatively declared law and doctrine, and the law in action, i.e. how early modern entrepreneurs actually organized themselves in daily life. This will ultimately lead to a better understanding as to what extent early modern entrepreneurs acted in accordance with legislative and doctrinal sources.