175 years ago, the Netherlands took great strides towards parliamentary democracy with a revamped Constitution. Where does the Constitution stand today?

Rik van Gijn was appointed professor of Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World from 1 December 2024. He is keen to use the position to set up research on language vitality. ‘People almost never give up their mother tongue entirely voluntarily.’

PhD defence

Lecture

Inaugural lecture

Conference

How do we prepare our students for a future labour market in which flexibility, resilience and adaptability are essential?

Arts and culture, Pianoconcert

In December 2023, Louise van der Vlugt was announced as Co-Winner of the 'Best Thesis in Jewish Studies' Award. She sat down to answer some questions about her prize-winning BA Thesis.

Vanessa de Malmazet has been working as HR policy advisor in FGGA's Faculty Office since March. Promoting employee well-being is high on the Faculty Board's list of priorities for the coming years. In this new role,

It’s not something the police force wants to see, but it still occurs: racist and misogynist police conduct. Human rights specialist Dr Linda Louis has studied how technology could help police officers behave correctly and comply with the applicable legal norms.

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor of Law & Technology at eLaw, was interviewed by EUobserver and Al Jazeera English on the European Commission’s newly unveiled Digital Omnibus package – a set of proposals that would amend the GDPR, the AI Act, cookie rules and parts of the EU’s cybersecurity…

How is academic freedom restricted by the academic community itself? This was the central question at a debate at Leiden University on 14 November.

Being rejected always hurts, but so does having to reject someone. Social psychologists have discovered that at interviews to select suitable housemates students dehumanise candidates to make it easier to reject them. That may sound harsh but, according to the researchers, it is also logical.

Diversity and inclusion within the police creates opportunities but also meets resistance. Professor by special appointment and former police officer, Saniye Çelik, emphasises how ambivalent feelings about D&I are essential to the learning process and can lead to informed decisions and real change.

Research into our history of colonialism and slavery, heart-to-heart conversations at a Keti Koti table, exhibitions, lectures and podcasts that establish the link between present and past. Staff and students participated in the national Slavery Memorial Year in many different ways. What have we learned…

Stories of resistance in the Second World War are widely covered in Dutch historiography: Hannie Schaft, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and Professor Cleveringa are some of the best known. But these accounts largely focus on the Dutch domestic perspective. On the other side of the world, a complex colonial…

Seven researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. This will enable them to start their own project, build their research team and put their best ideas into action.

Leiden University is under fire: it is allegedly doing too little to tackle antisemitism. Rector Hester Bijl responds to this accusation and to a video from 2014 on social media in which extreme remarks are made. ‘We can be short about such comments: they are unacceptable. The university is and always…

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

‘Countering violent extremism – the international deradicalization agenda’ is the name of the book Tahir Abbas published last month. In this interview the associate professor in Terrorism and Political Violence at ISGA tells about the backgrounds and goals of the book.

Computer scientist Matthijs van Leeuwen is one of four science faculty members who obtained the Senior Qualification in Education in 2021. What was that like and what drives him? ‘In my own education I would have liked to see more attention paid to the responsibility that machine learning and data mining…

The Faculty of Humanities is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive community for both students and staff. With the establishment of the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group, the faculty is a welcome step closer to creating a workplace where everyone feels at home and represented. We spoke…

Humans are increasingly losing agency on social media. A team of legal scholars from Leiden University, computer scientists from other universities and civil society organisations, is conducting a study into the balance of power between Big Tech and users.

‘Children’s rights are somewhat of a poor relation’, says Professor of Law and Health Mirjam Sombroek-van Doorm. In her inaugural lecture, she will emphasise how more attention needs to be paid to children’s rights in current thinking on law and health.

This column is different from all my previous ones. Normally I highlight one day from the previous two weeks, from early in the morning to late at night. Today, however, I want to look back on the past two weeks, the past few months, in fact. They have been coloured by the most difficult case I have…

They confounded expectations and went to university anyway – as a woman of colour, a working-class student or refugee... Throughout the centuries the university has always welcomed pioneers. Students for whom going to university was not the obvious choice and who did not grow up in an academic environment.…

Governments worldwide invest huge sums in their digital services and data strategies. Efficiency and effectiveness are key. But these are not achieved for some people at least, says Professor of Public Policy Sarah Giest. This makes the intended digital inclusion far from inclusive, as she will explain…

On 15 April Susanne Deen will start as Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator for Leiden Law School and the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. The aim of this new position is to contribute to establishing an inclusive community where all students and staff feel valued and respected, and can achieve…

Always taking the same route to work, going for that one dish in restaurants and going on the same holiday each summer: this may ring a bell for those who don’t like uncertainty. Researchers are now discovering that this aversion affects how we understand the world.

The state, and specifically the idea of nationality, is almost all-determining in social life in the Netherlands. It determines how people identify, how we interact with each other, and what (in)equality in society looks like. However, ultimately, the idea that we can divide people into different nationalities…

Youth crime has plummeted in the Netherlands. Good news, you might think. Yet we need to look critically at existing sanctions, says Professor by Special Appointment André van der Laan in his inaugural lecture. ‘We should evaluate whether our response is just.’

In January 2021, eLaw joined the Computers Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) Conference that is about privacy and data protection. The group on Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University put together a panel that combined perspectives on Art, Society, & Technology.

‘We want to say something very different from the norm. We are the radicals now.’ Tahir Abbas is lyric about the DRIVE project he will be leading from Leiden University in The Hague. This is a short introduction to the research that will be carried out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the United…

Organisation

In a collaborative effort between the Leiden Children’s Rights Observatory, the Leiden Law Academy, UNICEF and the Petitions Section of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, a symposium held last week commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Optional Protocol to the Convention…

University is often a period of sexual exploration and experimentation, generally to the satisfaction of all involved. But sometimes you want it and the other doesn’t. Or vice versa. Or you can’t really tell. This is what the Safe Space play at Theater Ins Blau was about on 11 October. And: can your…

The rule of law is crumbling in the Netherlands, lawyer Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You warned in her Cleveringa Lecture.