PhD Projects

The governance of patient data in Dutch healthcare is marked by tension between legal and ethical norms. While the GDPR permits data processing for healthcare for healthcare provision without consent, Dutch medical law and professional ethics often require or expect it, creating ambiguity, administrative burden, and barriers to data exchange. This project investigates when, why, and with what consequences consent is required for the primary use of health data under Dutch law. Combining legal analysis with empirical inquiry into healthcare practice, it seeks to clarify responsibilities and propose governance models that balance legal certainty, patient trust, and effective care.

This research will trace both the doctrinal evolution of consent requirements and their practical application in healthcare institutions. It assumes neither that consent is inherently necessary nor that it should be abolished but seeks to understand the interplay between law, ethics, and institutional governance that sustains its central role. The findings will inform recommendations for a more coherent and workable model of consent and data governance in Dutch healthcare.

Supervisors: Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Gijs van Dijck, and Andrea Heide (MUMC+)

Status: Ongoing (2025 – 2029)

More information: To be published

Description: This highly interdisciplinary research project is situated at the intersection of law, linguistics and computer science. It aims to explore how automation and computational tools can assist in the detection of legal (non-)compliance in the transposition of EU directives, specifically by applying comparative computational linguistics to the legislative texts of directives and their corresponding transpositions. The multilingual analysis extends to Member States that have Dutch, English, French, German or Spanish as an official legislative language. The legal area of focus is on consumer protection. The results of this project will provide empirical, quantitative evidence for observations commonly made in legal and legal-linguistic literature.

Supervisors: Rohan Nanda, Daniel On, Gijs van Dijck

Status: Ongoing (2021 – 2025)

More information: To be published

Description: This project aims to explore the effectiveness and acceptance of personalised law, with a focus on personalisation in privacy disclosures (e.g., privacy policies) and privacy decision-making (e.g., personalised privacy assistants). By grounding our research in user perspectives, we employ a range of qualitative and quantitative empirical methods—including surveys, eye-tracking experiments, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups—to investigate user responses and perceptions of personalisation for privacy protection. The findings will also contribute to the broader discussion on the feasibility of personalised legal treatments for all. 

Supervisors: Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux (University of Lausanne), Caroline Cauffman

Status:  Ongoing (2022 – 2025)

More information: To be published

Description: This project aims to explore the legal feasibility of using ‘nudge techniques’ in investment apps to enhance the protection of retail investors. We target common problematic behaviors among retail investors and propose a range of nudge interventions that could be implemented in investment apps to address these issues. To ensure the legality of the proposed interventions, we assess their compliance with regulations such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD), and the Digital Services Act (DSA). We also develop a theoretical basis for the ‘duty to nudge’ of investment app operators and conduct an economic analysis to assess whether operators have sufficient incentives to adopt these interventions. Therefore, this project aims to build a comprehensive theoretical framework for the use of nudges in investment apps, and we believe the findings will contribute to the broader discussion on retail investor protection and the lawful and ethical use of nudges. 

Supervisors: Caroline Cauffman, Monika Leszczynska (Texas A&M University)

Status: Ongoing (2022 – 2026)

More information: To be published

Description:  This research project explores what lies behind the claim of smart contracts to create ‘new and more efficient ways to formalise and secure agreements’, and how this claim can be satisfactory to the demands of commercial relationships in global trade. Are smart contracts designed merely to supplement traditional contracts with automation and data security, or do they aim to restructure the ways markets operate and commercial relationships are formed? Situated at the intersection of law and technology, this research investigates the place of smart contracts within the architecture of global trade agreements that often comprise a complex combination of formal legal norms and private ordering mechanisms. 

The research’s findings aim to establish common terminology among legal and computer science scholars within the topic of smart contracts through literature reviews and expert interviews, and to create a more transparent understanding of the potential of smart contracts in formalising and shaping commercial relationships.

Supervisors:  Jan Smits, Caroline Cauffman

Status:  Ongoing (2023 – 2029)

Description: Article 82 GDPR has direct effect and thus offers a direct legal remedy. However, the concept of damages is only very broadly defined. This project analyses whether and under which circumstances non-material damages should be awarded for psychological harms, such as anxiety and distress.

Supervisors: Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux (University of Lausanne), Gijs van Dijck

Status: Ongoing (2020 – 2025)

More information: [The relationship between the principle of effectiveness under Art. 47 CFR and the concept of damages under Art. 82 GDPR](https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipad012) and [Collective Damages for GDPR Breaches: A Feasible solution for the GDPR Enforcement Deficit?]( https://doi.org/10.21552/edpl/2022/4/8) 

Description: This interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of law, artificial intelligence, and access to justice. It examines how AI-driven tools can help self-represented individuals navigate Dutch tenancy law by translating layperson queries into legally valid and accessible information. The study investigates both how laypeople formulate legal questions and how AI can interpret these inputs to provide clear, reliable legal guidance. Using empirical legal research methods, including observational studies and crowdsourcing this project aims to bridge the communication gap between the legal problems laypeople phase and the objective legal relevant facts, in order to enable AI-systems to tailor to these laypeople. Ultimately, the findings will contribute to improving AI-based legal support systems, ensuring that access to justice is enhanced for those without legal representation.

Supervisors: Hannes Westermann, Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Gijs van Dijck

Status: Ongoing (2024 – 2028)

More information: To be published

Description: AI systems can pose a multitude of risks. But can we build AI models that perform well while reducing risks and complying with applicable laws? This project aims to develop a toolbox to make AI models more aligned with the accuracy requirement under the 2024 EU AI Act and to appropriately determine how to implement accuracy in their specific use cases. Furthermore, possible gaps will be identified in existing regulations that may be overly vague or misaligned with current practices for accuracy implementation in AI models. The research will be carried out taking a case-driven approach, with use cases taken primarily from AI applications in medicine and education.

Supervisors: Konrad Kollnig, Gijs van Dijck, Jerry Spanakis,

Status: Ongoing (2024 – 2028)

Description: This research examines the extraterritorial dimensions of EU digital legislation, focusing on the AI Act and the DSA. These new EU laws impose obligations on non-EU entities (e.g. companies), even if they have no assets or subsidiaries in the EU. The study examines whether such extraterritorial reach is justified under international and EU law, whether it is enforceable, and whether non-EU entities indicate to comply with these laws. Doctrinal and empirical methods, such as web scraping and AI-based website content analysis, are combined for a better understanding of the global impact of EU digital legislation.

Supervisors: Konrad Kollnig, Gijs van Dijck

Status: Ongoing (2024 – 2028)

More information: To be published

Description: The implementation of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is likely to encounter significant enforcement challenges, similar to those observed in previous EU digital regulations. This research aims to contribute to addressing these challenges by focusing on compliance measurement as a fundamental prerequisite for effective enforcement. The ability to measure and monitor compliance with the AI Act’s requirements is essential for its successful implementation. Yet, existing research on compliance measurement for AI legislations highlights a significant gap, particularly in interdisciplinary approaches that can connect the needs of enforcement agencies with innovative and practical solutions. Through a bottom-up approach, focused on real-world compliance measurement studies of critical AI Act provisions, we will collect evidence on current compliance practices and develop new methods, tools and insights for measuring compliance.

Supervisors: Konrad Kollnig, Gijs van Dijck

Status: Ongoing (2024 – 2028)

More information: To be published

Description: The online display advertising ecosystem plays an increasingly important role in today’s economy, acting as an intermediary among suppliers (e.g., publishers), demanders (e.g., advertisers), and individual consumers. Its growing popularity brings substantial benefits to multi-sided markets. However, competitive concerns arise when ad intermediaries are controlled by dominant undertakings. The primary concern is leveraging of market power, where a dominant undertaking extends its market power from one market to other markets and engages in potentially abusive conduct, such as self-preferencing, tying, and leveraging through data. 

Recognising that leveraging conduct is not inherently harmful to competition and consumer welfare, and in light of the lack of a clear, systematic framework for assessing abusive leveraging conduct in the online display advertising ecosystem, this research aims to fill this gap. By focusing on two types of leveraging conduct—self-preferencing and leveraging through data—and employing law and economics as a research method, this  research seeks to uncover the abusive nature and pro-/anti-competitive effects of these practices in both the Chinese and European online display advertising markets.

Supervisors: Niels Philipsen, Caroline Cauffman

Status: Ongoing (2022 – 2026)

More information: To be published