Biography

I conducted my PhD research at Maastricht University from 2010 until 2014. The research culminated in the thesis ‘Enforcing Corporate Social Responsibility Codes: On Global Self-Regulation and National Private Law’, which I defended in October 2014 (cum laude). In the dissertation, I focus on voluntary corporate codes of conduct and their interaction with national private law systems from a comparative legal and theoretical perspective.
Before conducting my PhD research, I studied law at the Universities of Frankfurt, Germany, and Linköping, Sweden, and I worked as a legal trainee for, amongst others, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an International Law Firm and the European Institute of Public Administration. I obtained the German law degree in 2007 and passed the bar exam in 2010.

My research interests include comparative and European private law, commercial law, social and legal theory, and company law. In my future research, I plan to look in more depth at the public role of private actors and the consequences that this should have for their regulation by private law. During my Max Weber Fellowship, I seek to focus on two case studies to that end, probably related to the financial industry and sporting organisations.

At Maastricht University, I have been teaching courses on International Business and Commercial Law and on Corporate Social Responsibility. I also gave a workshop on legal methods for PhD researchers. During my time in Frankfurt, I was involved in the teaching of courses on legal philosophy and contract law in the German law degree programme.