About SteR

Organisation

The organisation of SteR includes the board, the curatorium and the research fellows.

Organisational structure

Mission

SteR carries out high-quality legal research with a significant societal value. More specifically, this means that:

• SteR reflects on the supporting principles and fundamental rights of public law.
• SteR contributes to the conceptualisation and forming of theories in the area of public law, with a view to societal and political developments.
• SteR strives towards the application of scientific insights in international and national legal practice, policy and legislation.
• SteR invests in the education and supervision of students, doctoral students and young, talented researchers working within SteR to guide a new generation of legal practitioners and legal scientists to full maturity.
• With its research, SteR aims to position itself at the national top and in selected areas, at the European top. Those selected areas are migration law, institutional EU law, human rights, competition law, jurisprudence and criminology.

Vision and method

SteR research is characterised by:

• enduring focus on positive law and on the meaning and development of legal dogmatism which structures that positive law
• focus on comparative law research that deepens understanding of the developments in positive law
• its own position for meta juridical and empirical research, that also supports and reinforces legal dogmatic research and improves the 'translation' of the research results into practice
• a balance between national and international research, always with the choice for that 'publication platform' where the research generates the greatest impact, scientifically and societally.

Structure

There are seven public law and meta juridical departments in SteR. They are: General Legal Science, Administrative Law, International and European Law, Jurisprudence, Sociology of Law and Migration Law, Constitutional Law, and Criminal Law and Criminology. Each department is responsible for both education and research. SteR is built on four sub-programmes that reinforce and supplement each other:

1. Founding principles and fundamental rights
2. Interaction between national and international law
3. Conflict-resolving institutions
4. Migration and citizenship.

Newsletter

Twice a year, the newsletter of the Research Centre for State and Law (SteR) is published. This newsletter contains information on appointments, orations, PhDs, publications, current research and upcoming events. 

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