PhD Projects
Project: Economic Freedom in a Social Europe
By: Eline Couperus
Supervisors: prof. dr. Roland Pierik (Maastricht Law School), prof. dr. Sacha Garben (Collège d’Europe) and 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.
Project: Naturalistic natural law
By: Hugo Decker
Supervisors: prof. dr. Bram van Hofstraeten (Maastricht Law School) & dr. Antonia Waltermann (Maastricht Law School)
Description: This project examines the methodological problems within naturalistic natural law and explores their impact on current evolutionary approaches to morality. More precisely, it tries to answer three questions: (A) “What is naturalistic natural law?”, (B) “What do contemporary evolutionists claim vis-à-vis law and morality?” and (C) “Which methodological problems do they both encounter?”.
Project: Spiritual beings in legal categories: transcending the dichotomy of owning by reimagining the boundaries around legal personhood
By: Paula Lozada
Supervisors: prof. dr. Roland Pierik (Maastricht Law School), dr. Lukasz Dziedzic (Maastricht Law School)
Description: the purpose of this work is to transcend the subject/object duality embedded within current western international legal framework, established through property law and human rights. Recognizing ourselves as an integral part of nature, it is fundamental to see how a reciprocal system can be created, based on collaboration instead of domination. Writing from the Amazon to the world, alternative ways of relating to nature are conceptualized inspired on indigenous understanding of our interrelatedness. In conversation with posthuman theory and new-materialism, a translation is made from philosophy to legal conceptualization to reimagine the boundaries of the system around legal personhood.
Project: Questioning rights of nature for a more-than-human world
By: Adelheid van Luipen
Supervisors: prof. dr. Roland Pierik (Maastricht Law School), dr. Lukasz Dziedzic (Maastricht Law School) and dr. Marie Petersmann (London School of Economics)
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).
Project: Private Partnerships in early modern Amsterdam (17th – 18th centuries)
By: Manon Moerman
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.