Cooperation with other Faculties
The Faculty has a number of partnerships for scientific research, both nationally and internationally.
- National
- The Leiden Faculty of Law has participated since 2000 in the KNAW- recognised Research School Safety and Security in Society (NL: OMV), for which Erasmus University is secretary. Further participants in the Research School are the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and TNO. From Leiden, all fellows from the Law Faculty’s Security and Law Research Programme are involved in the School, including through participation in the courses organised by OMV for PhD candidates. An application for re-recognition by KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) was submitted in 2004.
- Since 1 January 2005 the Faculty has become part of the School of Human Rights Research. Participants in the Research School include the universities of Maastricht, Tilburg, Rotterdam (Erasmus) and Utrecht (as secretary), and in addition the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague. In particular, fellows of the faculty research programme Securing the Rule of Law in a World of Multilevel Jurisdiction, as well as researchers from the Constitutionalisering, transnationalisering en eenheid van het vermogensrecht (the Constitutionalising, Transnationalising and Unity of Property Law) programme are involved in the Research School. The Faculty has participated since 1998 in the Research School for Asiatic, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS). Although this Research School was formally discontinued in 2004, there is still ongoing cooperation between the partners. This cooperation takes the form of the participation of researchers from the Vollenhoven Institute in one of the clusters of CNWS, namely State-Society Relations in the Developing World. Further partners in the Research School were the Faculties of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and Arts (Leiden University), the Faculties of Arts from Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit), Nijmegen and Utrecht, the Faculty of Humanities from Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam) and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden.
- In the course of 1997 the Faculty initiated a partnership with some four sister faculties – the Law Faculties of Groningen, the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije University in Amsterdam and the Erasmus University in Rotterdam – under the name of: Law and Society. Within this context work is carried out on the themes of Dispute Settlement and Social Cohesion.
In addition, the Meijers Institute cooperates in a number of projects with the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of the Technical University Delft.
Examples of this cooperation can be found in the fields of ICT, transport law, tort law, real estate law, and air and space law.
- International cooperation
- With a view to strengthening the international profile of the Law Faculty, the Meijers Institute promotes cooperation with international researchers and research groups, as well as the international publication of – possibly joint – academic research. Mirroring the international university network LERU (League of European Research-intensive Universities), originally comprising 12 European universities, the Faculty of Law has set up its own international research network. Some 12 European Faculties of Law are now members of this network.
- The network is called the Strategic Alliance of Research Faculties of Law (SARFaL) and its prime focus is the exchange of researchers, joint publications and peer review, and will in time also comprise management review. The primary aim of SARFaL is to facilitate contacts between researchers in the different countries, supported by a website with search facilities: www. SARFaL.net.
The kick-off meeting was held in December 2003, at which all partners gathered in Leiden for the official launch of SARFaL, followed by a conference on a legal theme. Since that date, two plenary meetings were held in 2004, in Poitiers (June) and Geneva (November), and two in 2005, in Aarhus and Bologna (November).
