On 23 April, Andreas Häuselmann defended the thesis 'EU privacy and data protection law applied to AI: unveiling the legal problems for individuals'. The doctoral research was supervised by Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and Bart Custers.

Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) harmonizes the protection of personal data across the EU as of May 2018, its open norms in combination with cultural differences between countries result in differences in the practical implementation, interpretation and enforcement of personal…

At Psychology Lab on Wheels, we take your privacy and the security of your personal data very seriously. We want to assure you that all the information collected during this study will be handled in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As a PhD candidate, you probably work with personal data. That’s not just names and telephone numbers – it can also include things like cookies. To keep (personal) data as secure as possible, the university has established an information security policy.

Amy Strecker assesses the institutional framework for landscape protection, analyses the interplay between landscape and human rights, and links the etymology and theory of landscape with its articulation in law.

At Leiden University we like to stay in touch with our alumni. We therefore invite you by post, email or phone to lectures, workshops and masterclasses for alumni and inform you about developments in your field and at the University. With your knowledge and experience, you also make a valuable contribution…

At a time of urgent threats to both the planet and multilateralism, Brian McGarry (Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies) has published a new volume on the past and future of international environmental law.

Promotor: J.N. Kok, Co-promotor: W.A. Kosters

Tech company Eyeball collects images and data on young amateur football players on a large scale. But is this allowed? Bart Custers, Professor of Law and Data Science, and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne, Professor of Law and Digital Technologies, comment on the issue in ‘NRC’ newspaper.

ChEMBL is a large-scale drug discovery database containing bioactivity information primarily extracted from scientific literature.

The Dutch police must stop storing personal data indefinitely. This was decided by the Council of State following several publications by investigative journalism platform ‘Follow the Money’ (FTM). Bart Schermer, Professor of Law and Digital Technology, assisted in the investigation.

On Wednesday 13 December 2017 Jaap Wieland defended his doctoral thesis entitled ‘De bescherming van concurrentiebelangen in het bestuursrecht’ (the Protection of Competition Interests in Administrative Law).

What does it mean to protect against disaster in the context of climate change and other cascading environmental crises?

On 12 September 2019, Michiel Rhoen defended his thesis 'Big Data, Big Risks, Big Power Shifts: Evaluating the General Data Protection Regulation as an instrument of risk control and power redistribution in the context of big data'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. G.J. Zwenne and Prof.…

On 7 February 2019, Helena Ursic-Vrabec defended her thesis 'Uncontrollable: Data subject rights and the data- driven economy'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. S. van der Hof.

Edward Elgar has recently published an edited volume entitled “Realising Protection from Age Discrimination: International, Regional, and National Perspectives”. The book has been edited by Helen Meenan (visiting professor at Kingston University, UK) and Christa Tobler (Europa Institutes of the Universities…

On 10 September the students of the European Law Master gathered in the Lorentzzaal for the festive opening of their programme.

On 17 June 2026, Kseniia Soloveva defended the thesis 'Who is a foreign investor? Natural persons as protected investors in international investment law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Eric de Brabandere and Larissa van den Herik.

In this research project, the protection of personal data is compared in eight EU member states: France, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands. The comparison of the countries is focused on government policies for the protection of personal data, the applicable laws and…

On 23 June 2026, Joyce Esser defended the thesis 'Critique of Administrative Law: Constitutional Culture, Democracy, and Legal Protection in a Comparative Legal Perspective'. The doctoral research was supervised by Ymre Schuurmans and Ingrid Leijten.

Sarah Giest and Annemarie Samuels, both Assistant Professors at Leiden University, researched the quality and coverage of the data being collected for policiymakers to be used, specifically pertaining to minority groups.

The Dutch child protection system

How sustainable are open data infrastructures? Will the data we need in the future be available and usable? This project takes COVID-19 data/infrastructures as a case to study the sustainability and dynamics of open data infrastructures.

On 14 December, Jouke Tegelaar defended the thesis 'Single supervision, single judicial protection? Towards effective judicial protection in Single Supervisory Mechanism composite procedures'. The doctoral research was supervised by Matthias Haentjens and Willemien den Ouden.

Data reuse and big data: a taxonomy for personal data reuse.

On 1 October 2019, Emile Cammeraat defended his thesis 'Economic Effects of Social Protection'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. K.P. Goudswaard and Prof. P.W.C. Koning.

By comparing individual health data with population data, doctors can provide personalized health advice and patients can learn from each other's experiences. Wessel Kraaij, professor of Applied Data Analytics shows how personal data can have predictive value.

Hart Publishing in Oxford has published the first book in a series entitled ‘Restatement of Labour Law in Europe’. This particular book deals with the question of which employees are protected by labour law (‘The concept of employee’).

The extensive use of electronic communication channels and other devices has opened new possibilities for collecting data on human behavior. This information is sometimes openly accessible, but largely part of administrative registration systems that are not open to the broader public. The data provides…

Together with Prof. Barbara Graham-Siegenthaler, Christa Tobler has contributed a chapter to a liber amicorum for Prof. Sebastian Heselhaus of Lucerne University (Switzerland). The subject of the chapter are the European Union’s private international law rules in the field of inheritance as laid down…

This book presents concrete solutions for managing the legal risks distorting the development of various areas of EU law. It pursues an innovative and effective approach to identify legal risks, their causes at the EU level and their impacts on the functioning of the Union and its Member States. It…

The Data-Driven Drug Discovery Network (D4N) is an initiative by researchers from Leiden University and collaborators to join efforts in applying and developing novel techniques from data science to drug discovery and related topics from bioinformatics.

Data Sets Department of Economics

Today, everybody and everything produces data. People produce large amounts of data in social networks and in commercial transactions. Medical, corporate, and government databases continue to grow. Sensors continue to get cheaper and are increasingly connected, creating an Internet of Things, and generating…

Promotor: J.N. Kok, Co-Promotor: A.J. Knobbe

On 15 February 2018, Simone van der Hof gave a keynote lecture entitled 'Data Protection and Children's Rights - the reasoning behind the protective provisions for children in the GDPR' at the International School of Amsterdam conference on Strategic marketing & communications for international scho…

The change from a closed institution to an open living environment for patients with late stages of dementia will give the patients more freedom in their day-to-day life. The effect of this change on the patients’ mobility, activity and interaction with others will be assessed with sensor technology…

How can teachers be motivated by their students’ data in making stepwise changes to their teaching practices?

LACDR adheres to strict data management rules, with the aim to make our data findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. For this reason all LACDR PhD candidates are required to prepare a data management plan and to implement data management rules accordingly. All PhD candidates follow a data…

The ability to collect and interpret huge quantities of data has become indispensable to society and academia. Leiden University is a knowledge and expertise centre for data science that places the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.

The majority of scientists, from archaeologists through to zoologists, collect huge volumes of data. Their massive databases contain large amounts of information which is difficult for humans to filter. With a solid grounding in statistics, we can develop algorithms for analysing and identifying patterns…