Funding for Law Sector Plan now structural
Now the Dutch national Law Sector Plan has been positively evaluated, the temporary funding provided to Leiden Law School for the research projects ‘Institutions for Conflict Resolution’ and ‘Empirical Legal Studies’ will become structural.
The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) is converting the temporary funding of research projects within the Law Sector Plan into a structural contribution to Leiden Law School, amounting to €800,000. This decision comes after a positive final evaluation of the Law Sector Plan, which has been running since 2018. The first phase of the Sector Plan concludes this year. From now on, the funding will be part of the permanent funding for the education and research of OCW.
Law Sector Plan
The Law Sector Plan was established to strengthen cooperation between law faculties in the Netherlands, to conduct socially relevant research and education, and to have each faculty focus on certain themes. Together, the law faculties formulated five key research themes. Our faculty decided to focus on two of these themes: Conflictoplossende Instituties (Institutions for Conflict Resolution (COI)) and Empirical Legal Studies (ELS).
Positive evaluation
OCW provided the faculties with funding for a period of six years to work on the chosen themes. The evaluation committee has concluded that the plan has given a powerful boost to the legal discipline and has strengthened the connection between education and research. The positive assessment means that the faculty has clearly made its mark in the research areas COI and ELS.
COI and ELS
The role of the courts was the focus of the COI research theme. Research has been conducted on which processes lead people to turn to the courts (or not), how parties experience legal proceedings, and how the judiciary’s problem-solving capacity can be strengthed. One important outcome from this research project was the publication ‘De conflictoplossende rol van de rechter in kleine en grote zaken’, on the role of the judiciary in solving minor and major conflicts.
Within ELS, the aim was to put empirical legal research on the map, so that lawyers and social scientists would work together in an interdisciplinary way and conduct research into legal issues at the intersection of law and behaviour. There is now an active ELS research community and many staff members have benefitted from courses and workshops to improve their empirical skills.
Follow-up to themes: research focus areas
The faculty will continue with COI and ELS within the broader faculty research focus areas. COI will become part of the focus area Trust in institutions, which deals with the trust of citizens in public institutions (or the lack of trust).
ELS is part of the research focus area Law and empirical research, which aims to extend empirical approaches in law to all institutes at the faculty and to other researchers from other faculties.
Acknowledgement from the Faculty Board
The Faculty Board would like to thank Miranda Boone, Jessie Pool and Helen Pluut, as well as all others involved at COI and ELS. Thanks to their commitment, these themes have been incorporated in the research and education within our faculty. As a result, we can now build further on them within the faculty research focus areas.