The Institute of Public Law comprises all areas of public law, with the exception of criminal law, and including labour law.

The institute that focuses on Public Law is as broad as the field itself. The Institute of Public Law has six departments, each with its own research agenda.

We would all like to live in a world in which individuals feel safe, conflicts are resolved peacefully and the interests of future generations are taken into consideration. At Leiden University legal scholars investigate to what extent public international law meets the needs of a globalised society.…

Are you thinking about studying Public International Law? Learn more and watch the videos.

Public International Law is a one-year Master’s specialisation at the internationally acclaimed Leiden Law School at Leiden University. The programme focuses on the legal framework that governs international relations in an increasingly complex global society.

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Our Master Public International Law (L.L.M.) you will gain understanding of the legislation that governs international relations in a complex global society

Are you thinking about studying the Advanced LL.M. Public International Law? Learn more and watch the videos.

This PhD dissertation examines international responsibility for the crime of aggression from a public international law perspective. Under customary international law, as well as the amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted in the Review Conference in Kampala in 2010,…

How can international investment law and arbitration take account of the public interest in, and more broadly, the public dimension of, the relations between foreign investors and host States ?

Rutsel Martha, former Minister of Justice of the Dutch Antilles, former General Counsel of Interpol and alumnus of Universiteit Leiden, elaborated on the position of states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in international financial law.

The Faculty Board has appointed Professor Ymre Schuurmans as Academic Director of the Institute of Public Law. Schuurmans is Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law and was Head of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law for the past six years.

Anne Meuwese is appointed Professor of Public Law & Governance of AI at Leiden University as of 1 November 2020. This position is part of the University SAILS network, one of the new university-wide interdisciplinary development programmes funded by the Executive Board of Leiden University.

On 24 juni 2021, Jing Zhang defended his thesis 'The Rationale of Publicity in the Law of Corporeal Movables and Claims'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. H.J. Snijders and J.A. van der Weide.

From 14 to 15 September 2023, Simona Demkova, AI researcher at the Europa Institute, participated in the INDIGO Project Final Conference, where she provided valuable perspectives on the implications of AI for European public law.

Professor Willemien den Ouden has been appointed as the new Academic Director of the Institute of Public Law starting 1 September 2017. She will take over from Professor Wim Voermans who has held this position for the past seven years.

The postdoc received the 2020 Thesis Prize for her PhD research on the role of the EU Member States in regulating and remedying corporate human rights violations.

On 2 December, Roel Becker and Joyce Esser, both PhD candidates at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law, gave a lecture for their colleagues and the students of Res Publica, the master’s association Constitutional and Administrative Law. In the lecture, they paid attention to the…

How should jurisdictions, both on the national and on the supra-national level, handle the interaction between public and private law where it regards the regulation of financial markets?

On 3 March 2022, Cambridge University Press published An Introduction to Public International Law, a co-authored textbook led by Cecily Rose.

On 19-20 October 2023, Europa Institute’s Simona Demkova and Melanie Fink, together with Giulia Gentile (Essex Law School), co-hosted an Expert Roundtable on the topic of ‘The Future of EU Public Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,’ in the context of the Digital Constitutionalism (The DigiCon…

This article studies the perceived legitimacy of EU enforcement actions.

Sofia Ranchordas (1985) has been appointed Chair European and Comparative Public Law and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. She will start this position on October 1st.

During the opening of the Faculty year on 5 September 2023, Barend Barentsen, Professor of Labour Law, and Annemarie Drahmann, Associate Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, were presented with the JSVO Teaching Awards 22-23.

On Friday 24 February Prof. Judith Masson, professor of Socio-legal Studies at Bristol University and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science in the U.K., will deliver a lecture within the Leiden Socio-Legal Series.

The Faculty of Law has five institutes:

The world is full of wars, and no war is without its dead. What happens to the bodies of fatal casualties of armed conflict? The winner of the faculty Jongbloed Thesis Prize 2015 is Welmoet Wels (Public International Law). Her thesis Dead body management in armed conflict: paradoxes in trying to do…

Jason Rudall, Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, has published a monograph entitled 'Responsibility for Environmental Damage'.

From deepfakes and disinformation to killer robots, surgical robots and AI lawmaking: AI (Artificial Intelligence) is changing our world. That raises the question whether this requires some form of regulation. At eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University, prof. Bart Custers…

Professor Christa Tobler and Jacques Beglinger have written two new publications.

On 27 October 2015, four talented international students from Leiden University/Campus The Hague and the International Institute of Social Studies received the Wim Deetman Scholarships 2015-2016.

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 increase in the European Union's executive powers in the areas of economic and financial governance has thrown into sharp relief the challenges of EU law in constituting, framing, and constraining the decision-making processes and political choices that have hitherto supported European integration.…

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’).

How do we incorporate and embed rules and principles that enter the private law system?

This book is the first to incorporate current academic literature and case law on European, transnational, and international media law into a comprehensive overview intended primarily for students.

In August 2018, the fourth edition of the teaching and learning materials

In this lecture professor Harding considered the implications of Asia's 21st-century rise for its legal systems and our approaches to studying them in the new situation we confront in the early 21st century.

On 11 April 2024, Sophie Starrenburg, Assistant Professor at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, organised a workshop on ‘Climate Change and Cultural Heritage: Moving from Heritage Loss to Reparation’ at Tilburg Law School.

The Advisory Committee on Public International Law (Dutch abbreviation CAVV) is an independent body which provides the government and parliament of the Netherlands with advice, both solicited and unsolicited, on issues related to public international law.

In the past years access to EU law has been significantly enhanced via services such as EUR-Lex. This development not only allows for easy retrieval of individual legal acts, but for collecting information about the evolution of EU law in the aggregate as well.

The Advanced Master's specialization International Criminal Law at Leiden University examines international criminal law and international criminal procedure.

This article provides an all-inclusive overview of public diplomacy literature that relates to a myriad of issues and has been studied from various points of view.

The Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International Humanitarian Law and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies hosted the second annual “International Humanitarian Law Clinic Exchange Conference”, from 8 to 14 December 2016, in The Hague. The idea to organize the conference stems from a collaboration…

Published by Brill Nijhoff and written by leading experts including national judges, academics and practitioners East African Community Law is the first comparative as well as open access textbook on EAC law. The book provides a key resource for the research, teaching, and practice of EAC law. It also…

Whether implicitly or explicitly, we all have ideas about how the law is supposed to function, whose interests it should represent, and what role it should play in society. This project explores the ways in which these questions are addressed in the works of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus…