"PBL Changes Them"

Two universities, one insight

Studying law at the University of Otago meant long evenings of close reading cases, attending carefully to argument structure and the nuances between judgments. It was rigorous, traditional, and formative. Then came Maastricht, and the contrast was immediate.

"Here, education was organised around problems, and the tutor was a facilitator of collaborative inquiry rather than the authority at the front of the room. That comparison taught me that method is not neutral. How you teach shapes what students learn to do and ultimately who they become as legal thinkers."

That insight, simple to state yet profound in its implications, became the foundation of everything that followed. Nicole did not simply absorb two different educational traditions. She began to think seriously about what they revealed: that the how of education is never separate from the what, and that legal education, in particular, has consequences that extend far beyond the lecture hall.

"My driving conviction is that preparing the next generation of legal professionals deserves real educational expertise. We are trained as lawyers, not as educators. I want to help build that expertise within the faculty."

And then, with a quiet certainty that runs through much of how she speaks:

"Education, at its best, doesn't simply equip people with knowledge and skills. It changes them."

The choice

About twelve years ago, Nicole made a decision that raised more than a few eyebrows. She chose to devote her academic career fully to education, to teaching, curriculum development, educational innovation and leadership, at a time when universities measured academic worth almost exclusively in research output.

"At that time, many colleagues thought I was throwing my career away. I made the choice anyway, at a point when universities had not yet begun to rethink what an academic career could look like."

She made it anyway. And this year, at the Dies Natalis marking the University of Maastricht's 50th anniversary, that choice was recognised with the Wynand Wijnen Education Prize, the university's most prestigious award for educational achievement, named for the man who helped build the problem-based learning culture that defines Maastricht.

"The prize is recognition that the choice was not wrong. And that matters more than I had expected."

But receiving it, she admits, felt complicated.

"Educational work is never done alone. The prize is awarded to one person; the effort and the credit belong to a much wider community: colleagues, tutors who carry the daily work of the programme, students who ask the hard questions and remind you why it matters. I accept it with gratitude, and with the awareness that I would not be standing there without the many dedicated colleagues I have the privilege to work with."

Rethinking the European Law School

The prize did not arrive in a vacuum. In recent years, Nicole has been one of the driving forces behind a fundamental revision of the Bachelor European Law School, not a refresh of content, but a rethinking of purpose.

The programme was designed over twenty years ago. The world, she argues, had changed too much for incremental updates to suffice.

"That pointed us toward a deeper question: not what content needs updating, but what kind of jurist are we actually educating, and for what kind of world?"

The most significant shift was in what the programme means by a comparative and European perspective, a phrase central to ELS since its founding. Where the old approach compared legal systems side by side to identify convergence and divergence, the new one asks something more fundamental.

"What fundamental questions must any system answer, and what does the range of possible answers tell us? The aim is to develop the capacity to read any legal system critically, to understand that the choices embedded in any legal system are exactly that: choices. And asking why different systems make different choices is as important as knowing what those choices are."

The result, she hopes, is a different kind of graduate. Not one who knows EU law and four national systems, but one who can engage seriously with any legal system. The revised narrative captures it simply: educating European jurists in a globalising world.

Why PBL still matters, especially now

It is no coincidence that the prize bears the name of a PBL pioneer. Problem-based learning is the pedagogical soul of Maastricht, and Nicole is one of its most thoughtful advocates, not as a method to be followed, but as a philosophy of how people actually learn.

"PBL is sometimes reduced to a set of procedures. But at its core it is an understanding of how people learn: through engaging with genuine problems, collaborative inquiry, and integrating knowledge with the real world."

The challenge for a mature PBL institution, she believes, is keeping that philosophy alive, ensuring it remains genuinely problem-centred rather than becoming a comfortable ritual.

"It is in the complexity and uncertainty at the heart of a good PBL problem that something important happens. Students encounter the world, meet resistance, and are challenged to take a stand and take responsibility. The capacity to reason carefully under uncertainty and to own your judgment is precisely what AI cannot substitute for."

Which brings her to the question she finds herself returning to more and more.

The story continues after the photo.

What AI reveals

Generative AI, Nicole argues, is not primarily a technological challenge. It is a diagnostic one.

"I find the usual framing of 'opportunity versus threat' limited. It leaves a more important question unexamined: what does AI reveal about legal education itself?"

What it reveals, in her view, is a problem that predates it. Legal education has long assumed that asking students to produce legal analyses generates the thinking from which real learning derives. AI breaks that assumption.

"When a student can produce a fluent, well-structured legal analysis without doing the interpretive work themselves, the task and the learning come apart. That is not primarily an integrity problem. It is a deeper educational one. And it was already there before AI made it visible."

There is a second thing AI exposes: that much of what students absorbed about how to reason like a lawyer came from sustained, effortful engagement with legal materials over time. When AI-generated text substitutes for that engagement, something important is lost.

Her response is not to ban AI or design around it, but to ask more clearly what legal education is actually for.

"What AI cannot replicate is the encounter itself, the moment when a student must articulate and defend an interpretation to real people, face genuine challenge, and take responsibility for their reasoning in front of others. It is through that encounter, not through the sourcing of information, that independent legal judgment is formed. That is what a Maastricht legal education has always been about."

The grounded jurist

Ask Nicole what she most wants ELS graduates to carry with them, and she reaches for a concept she has been developing in her research: the grounded jurist.

"Not simply technically competent, but someone with the inner orientation to remain present, reflective and responsible when legal meaning is contested and something real is at stake."

In practice, that means being able to reason within law as an interpretive practice rather than applying rules mechanically. It means knowing yourself well enough to exercise judgment under uncertainty. It means being able to engage seriously with others, to listen, to disagree without dominating, to take responsibility for your reasoning. And it means understanding that legal decisions have consequences for real people.

"A law faculty has a responsibility to engage with the hard questions. Law is one of the primary ways societies organise themselves, resolve conflict, and respond to change. A faculty that educates grounded jurists is the kind of institution that earns its place in society."

45 years, and what has deepened

In 2026, the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University celebrates its 45th anniversary. Nicole has been at the faculty since 1999, long enough to have witnessed nearly half of its 45-year history from the inside. What strikes her most, looking back, is not how much has changed, but how much has deepened.

"The diversity of perspectives in tutorial rooms, legally, culturally, linguistically, has only grown over the years, shaping what is possible educationally in ways none of us fully anticipated."

The development that has moved her most, though, is closer to her own story. The establishment of the Maastricht Institute for Legal Education, MILE, with its focus on research into legal education and the professionalisation of teachers, feels like a landmark development.

"It is something I could only have dreamed of twelve years ago when I made my career choice. It is recognition that education deserves the same rigour and scholarly attention we bring to law itself."

If she had to name what makes the Maastricht way distinctive, she would call it a particular kind of intellectual honesty.

"A willingness to sit with questions that do not have clear-cut answers, and to treat that not as a problem, but as the point. The tutorial room is a place where you are expected to think, to be challenged, and to discover that someone else's reading of the same case could be just as defensible as your own."

Her hope for the next 45 years is quietly ambitious: that the faculty continues to take education as seriously as it takes research, not as an administrative obligation, but as a source of institutional pride. And that its graduates are recognisable not simply by their technical competence, but by their capacity for independent, ethically grounded judgment.

"That is what a Maastricht legal education should mean. And I believe it is what it has always been striving toward."

What grounds her

Outside the faculty, Nicole Kornet is, above all, a mother. Her two teenagers, Alex, seventeen, and Erik, fourteen, keep her busy and, she says, grounded in the best possible way.

"Whether it is learning more about Star Wars than I ever knew possible, cheering them on at football, or the conversations that happen at the dinner table, they remind me of what matters."

It is, perhaps, the most fitting note on which to end a portrait of someone who has spent her career arguing that education is not just about knowledge, but about formation. About becoming. About being changed.

She knew it, in some way, when she was organising that after-school club in New Zealand. She has been building the argument ever since.


More stories, events,and news on the Law alumni website >