Since August 2008, I am professor of Legal Philosophy and Jurisprudence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. A central theme of my research and teaching is the interaction between law, ethics and society. A special focus is on how law and politics should deal with the dynamics of cultural and religious pluralism. A second central theme concerns the methods of legal research as a hermeneutic, normative, argumentative, and empirical interdiscipline.
Since September 2014, I am Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London, associated with the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context. I have also been a visiting scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney; the Centre for Ethics of the University of Toronto; the Center for Human Values in Princeton, N.J.; the Ersta Institute for Health Care Ethics, Stockholm; and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California at Berkeley.
Before I moved to Rotterdam, I was professor of Jurisprudence (‘Metajuridica’ or the interdisciplinary study of law) at Tilburg University. From 1996 until 2002, I directed in Tilburg the NWO-‘PIONIER’ research programme ‘The Importance of Ideals in Law, Morality, and Politics’. From 1986 until 1994, I worked in Utrecht at the Centre for Bioethics and Health Law and at the Department of Philosophy. From 1977 until 1985, I studied law and moral philosophy, also in Utrecht.
I have held various academic and societal functions. From 2002 until 2006, I was president of the national board of the Remonstrant Church, a liberal Protestant church.
Section Sociology, Theory and Methodology
Erasmus School of Law
Erasmus University Rotterdam
PO Box 1738
3000 DR Rotterdam
tel. 010 408 2912
e-mail: vanderburg (at) law.eur.nl
Most of my English papers may be found on SSRN. Blogs (in Dutch) can be found here.
News & announcements
August 2017: New course Skills Seminar Legal Theory
Our section Sociology, Theory and Methodology of Law at ESL is responsible for a new LL.M. track in Legal Theory. The new master course Research Skills Seminar Legal Theory will start in September; I am excited to be one of the teachers.
July 2017: Article in Jurisprudence published
My article ‘Law as a Second-Order Essentially Contested Concept’, has been published in an issue of Jurisprudence, Issue 2 and is Open Access.
9 February 2017: Lecture in Bristol
On 9 February 2017, I delivered the Slaughter and May Annual Jurisprudence Lecture A Pluralist Account of Legal Interactionism, at the School of Law, University of Bristol.
September 2016: Book available in paperback with Routledge
My book The Dynamics of Law and Morality. A Pluralist Account of Legal Interactionism, Routledge – has now been published in a paperback edition with Routledge.
