'Law and empirical research' is one of Leiden Law School's four research focus areas.

What did colonial officials and missionaries think they were doing?

Seminar

On Monday, 27 November 2017 the report 'Pre-trial detention of juveniles in practice' has been published. The report is compiled by researchers from the departments of Child Law and Criminology of the Leiden University.

On Thursday 12 January 2017, Ellen Raaijmakers defended her doctoral thesis ‘The Subjectively Experienced Severity of Imprisonment: Determinants and Consequences’. The defence took place at the Academy Building of Leiden University, Rapenburg 73. The PhD research was supervised by Professor P. Nieuwbeerta…

An international team of researchers, involving members from the ERC Synergy project NEXUS 1492 based at the Leiden University, the Universities of Oklahoma, Copenhagen and York reveal challenges when studying ancient microbiomes in a recent issue of Scientific Reports.

Types of supervision for prisoners on conditional release include the requirement to report regularly to a parole officer, electronic house arrest or community service. These are all serious measures for the person on whom they are imposed and for society. But it is a subject on which little research…

Arbeidsuitbuiting van migranten wordt als een vorm van het strafrechtelijke delict mensenhandel beschouwd. De rechtspositie van de slachtoffers is mede daardoor ondergeschikt aan de strafrechtelijke procedure. Dat kan en moet anders, stelt Gerrie Lodder in haar proefschrift. Promotie op 21 april 202…

Ambroise Paré, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave: all were great medical innovators in their time. We know far less about the 19th-century Russian physician and scientist Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. PhD candidate Inge Hendriks researched him in Dutch and Russian archives and collections. She discovered…

Chiara Piccoli has been awarded a scholarship by the Italian Research Council to work at the Virtual Heritage Lab of the Institute of Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage (ITABC-CNR) in Rome.

Niek Strohmaier and Gitta Veldt will start as assistant professors within the project Empirical Legal Studies (ELS). Their appointments are part of the sector plan of Leiden Law School.

Source: Br. J. Pharmacol., Volume 172, Issue 3, pp. 940-55 (2015)

Following the retirement of Roswitha Manning, a vacancy arose at Faculty of Archaeology for the role of Research Policy Advisor. We found one in the person of Jimmy Mans, a well known face for longer-serving Faculty staff. In this interview we reconnect with Jimmy, who calls himself ‘a homegrown Leiden…

Research Master’s students in Archaeology Rosa Seepma and Aida Tadesse received an Incentive Prize from the Dutch Association for Physical Anthropology (NVFA). They were awarded this honor for their ongoing study on the human osteology collection at the Allard Pierson Museum.

Learning how computers can process and describe images just like human beings do. It is one of the key elements of the research of Michael Lew, who sees Deep Learning as a promising way to achieve this goal. On the 1st of January 2021, he was appointed Professor of Deep Learning at the Leiden Institute…

The Faculty of Archaeology is welcoming two new Education Directors this spring: Aris Politopoulos for the bachelor’s programme and Rachel Schats for the master’s and research master’s programmes.

Abstract submission is now open for the international conference of the ELS Academy, in Amsterdam on September 1 and 2. For the 2022 International ELS Conference, we invite all involved in legal research using qualitative and/or quantitative methods to submit abstracts, that may focus on ongoing or…

On Wednesday 5 February 2025 Milan Ismangil successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Do citizens care for interest representation? A study on citizens’ perceptions and feelings towards the representative potential of civil society

On 1 April 2023, Rowie Stolk of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law started a new appointment for 0.7 FTE at Empirical Legal Studies Leiden (ELS@Leiden). ELS provides a platform that brings together legal scholars and social scientists to collaboratively explore legally relevant…

Authorities in Denmark and Sweden are examining whether it is possible to ban Quran burning following recent incidents. These have caused tension in many Islamic countries as well as in the countries where they occurred.

Jasper de Bie, who obtained his doctoral degree at the Institute of Criminal Law & Criminology and who is currently employed by the Ministry of Security and Justice, has been awarded an honourable third place in the international competition 'TRI Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Terrorism…

As of 1 April 2025, Professor E.A.L.M.G (Elke) Moons has been appointed professor by special appointment of the chair ‘Crime Statistics’ at Leiden University’s Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden Law School.

Aid workers being summoned to appear before a court in Greece and more stringent rules for rescue boats in Italy. Is providing aid to asylum seekers being criminalised? There's no doubt about it, according to Joanne van der Leun and Peter Rodrigues.

The increasing Technological opportunities of Virtual Reality (VR) increasingly resemble the real world (and more). In Japan VR holidays are very popular and VR porn is emerging.

On 21 January 2021, Fachrizal Afandi defended his thesis ‘Maintaining Order: Public Prosecutors in Post-Authoritarian Countries, the case of Indonesia’. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.W. Bedner and Prof. J.H. Crijns.

Leiden University, together with Utrecht University and Radboud University in Nijmegen, has received a research grant from the Covid-19 programme of ZonMw, the Dutch organisation for research into health care.

Stephanie Rap and Chrisje Sandelowsky-Bosman have contributed as authors to the online training manual for lawyers, that is developed as part of the training programme Advancing the Defence Rights of Children.

Social media are playing a key role in calling for resistance to the corona measures. Online, agreements are made about where and when people will gather to protest. The authorities are not always fully aware of what is happening and cannot just infiltrate, whereas civilians can often easily participate…

The Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies in collaboration with the University of Geneva, the Chinese Journal of International Law (ChineseJIL, OUP) and the European Society of International Law (ESIL), are pleased to invite public international scholars and researchers to attend a conference…

From the 27th of February to the 1st of March 2018, students from four different universities attended the interuniversity workshop “A future for EU” (F4EU) in Liège, Belgium.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni funding to two researchers from the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. Anke Ramakers and Hilde Wermink. This award offers these criminologists the opportunity to develop their own ideas over a period of three years.

Pavel Durov, CEO of chat and messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France last week. The Russian tech billionaire flew into Paris by private jet and was arrested on suspicion of cybercrimes. Telegram allegedly facilitates criminal activities such as money laundering. This raises the question of how…

The prosecution of violent fathers is regularly abandoned, supposedly ‘in the best interests of the child’. Assistant professor Mojan Samadi responds in an interview with RTL and Investico: ‘It’s problematic if you accept this argument as a matter of course.’

Er is een nijpend cellen- en personeelstekort in Nederlandse gevangenissen. En dit is niet voor de eerste keer. Miranda Boone, hoogleraar criminologie en vergelijkende penologie, sprak met Trouw over de problematiek: ‘Het aantal gevangenen is het resultaat van beleid.’

Door de totale anonimiteit van online servers is het erg lastig om cybercriminelen op te sporen. Dat moet anders, vindt Femke Halsema. Universitair docent Jan-Jaap Oerlemans en hoogleraar Law and Data Science Bart Custers spraken met de Volkskrant.

Insurers determine for themselves whether someone has committed fraud, impose sanctions immediately and hardly ever report it. As a result, police, prosecutors, and criminal courts are side-lined. And policyholders are sometimes left out in the cold. Bart Custers, professor of Law & Data Science at…

On Wednesday 25 June 2025 Dechun Zhang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

On Wednesday 24 September 2025 Marija Šerić successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In this study, we investigated the electrochemical behavior and surface evolution of Au(111) electrode under different conditions and electrochemical techniques, using a homemade electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope (EC-STM), revealing the intricate interplay between surface roughening, atom…

PhD defence

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Every January, students of the Minor Sustainable Development have the opportunity to put what they’ve learned over the last few months into practice in a choice of exciting and practical courses called Area Studies. This year, for the first time, there was a choice of four locations: The Netherlands,…

The battle at the Tollense valley took place in 1300 BC, the Bronze age. The archaeological site now is being threatened by climate chance. In an international collaboration, archaeologist Martijn Manders and his students are involved in the ongoing fieldwork.

Course

She studied Korean and Asian Studies and, four years after graduating, is now working as a specialist for an ICT secondment company. This is the story of Lisette Atsma’s career (27).

‘Without that Veni grant, I would never have been able to delve into my subject so deeply. During the first two months, I only read articles and other professional literature. A dream, I would skip home afterwards.’

Courts that adjudicate war crimes or other crimes against humanity are increasingly taking regional norms and cultural values into consideration. PhD candidate Seun Bakare examined whether this could also be an asset in cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Are international courts effective? Dr Fatou Bensouda, a former Lead Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague (ICC), will discuss this issue during her lecture at the Owada Symposium 2025. The ICC’s efficacy depends on the actions of its member states, she says.