Biography
Maria Weimer is a socio-legal scholar specialising in European law and governance. She is currently an Associate Professor of European Law at the Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, and has recently been appointed Full Professor of European Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, a position she will take up in June 2025. She has held various academic leadership roles, including serving as Director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance and as a governing board member of the interdisciplinary Amsterdam Centre for European Studies. She is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Risk Regulation and a member of the Executive Board of EULawLive. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, she held academic positions at Maastricht University, the University of Bremen, and Hamburg University. She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute.
Maria’s research examines the role of risk in EU law both as a regulatory object – spanning health, environmental, sustainability, and digital governance – and as an organising principle shaping regulatory legitimacy and governance. Her work engages with broader transformations of statehood beyond the nation-state, theories of transnational and global law, and the legitimacy and democratic challenges of the EU’s regulatory state. She is particularly interested in the role of knowledge, especially techno-scientific expertise, in legal decision-making and democratic governance. Her research is interdisciplinary, operating at the intersection of public and transnational law, risk regulation, regulatory governance, science and technology studies, and political and social theory. Her scholarship has been widely published, including the monograph Risk Regulation in the Internal Market (Oxford University Press 2019) and the edited volume Regulating Risks in the European Union: The Co-production of Expert and Executive Power (Hart 2017).
During her research stay at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, Maria will work on a research project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, investigating the legitimacy of EU transnational environmental regulation (with a focus on the EU Deforestation Regulation). She will also develop a new research agenda exploring the role of imagination and fictional expectations in European governance of technological risk under radical uncertainty (spanning health, environmental and AI governance).