Since August 2008, I am professor of Legal Philosophy and Jurisprudence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Here, I have done research on conflicts in the multireligious society, on an interactionist theory of law and morality, and on legal research methods. In Rotterdam, I have taught courses on each of these themes as well as on jurisprudence and legal philosophy.

Between 1993 (since 1995 full time) and 2008, I worked at Tilburg University as senior researcher and full professor. In 1996, I received a PIONIER-grant from NWO for a broad interdisciplinary research programme on the importance of ideals in law, morality and politics, in which between 1996 and 2001 more than twenty researchers participated. In 2001, I was appointed as a full professor of ‘metajuridica’, or the interdisciplinary study of law, at the Tilburg Law School. In Tilburg, I taught courses in jurisprudence, legal philosophy and legal sociology.

From 1986 until 1994, I worked in Utrecht at the Centre for Bioethics and Health Law and at the Department of Philosophy. I taught courses in ethics and practical philosophy in the departments of philosophy, theology, social sciences and biology. In 1991, I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the normative foundations of democracy, applied to issues such as minority rights and equal treatment legislation. At the Utrecht Center for Bioethics and Health Law, I worked as researcher and project leader Ethics and Law. I conducted and supervised research on a wide range of issues in bioethics and health law.

I have been Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London from 2014-2020, where I taught courses on jurisprudence and seminars on research methods. I have also had longer academic stays 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.

From 1977 until 1985, I studied law and moral philosophy, at Utrecht University. My combined master thesis on civil disobedience was awarded with the Kluwer’s Post Scriptum Prize 1986 and published as a book.

I published ten books and small monographs (nine in Dutch, one in English) and co-edited six books (four in English, two in Dutch) and a double special issue of the Erasmus Law Review. I published in journals such as Ethics, Bioethics, Law and Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Ratio Juris, Journal of Value Inquiry, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Archiv für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophy. A number of my articles were translated into German, French and Turkish.

I have held various academic and societal positions. From 2002 until 2006, I was president of the national board of the Remonstrant Church, a liberal Protestant church. In various ways, I have contributed to the public debate in the Netherlands, in the last years mostly on themes concerning the multicultural and multireligious society. Obviously, most of these contributions are in Dutch. For more information, see the Dutch page.

My Curriculum Vitae can be downloaded here: Download