Profile

About the research centre

Radboud Business Law Institute (Onderzoekcentrum Onderneming & Recht, OO&R) facilitates and conducts high-quality academic research in the field of business-oriented private law. The institute is a collaboration between the Radboud University Law Faculty and a number of partners, which are renowned national and international law firms, financial institutions and multinationals.

The institute structurally cooperates with foreign research institutes, such as the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, the University of Oxford, and the KU Leuven.

The institute has been accredited since 1998 as a research centre by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen).

Research programmes

The institute has four research programmes:

1. Business and patrimonial Law
2. Company law
3. Finance, security rights and insolvency law
4. Financial law

The research programme Business and patrimonial law forms the foundation upon which the three other research programmes build.

Our mission

We enhance the law that concerns the operation of businesses through fundamental academic research, the education of legal practitioners and scholars and public engagement, thereby contributing to the resilience, sustainability and security of society.

Our core values

We are guided by our core values: quality, integrity and an orientation on legal practice. Our research has to meet the highest academic quality standards. Integrity in conducting academic research is an important building block for guaranteeing that quality. At the heart of our approach lies a firm belief in the cross-fertilisation of research, education and legal practice, which we consider of vital importance for the relevance, quality and innovative power of our research.

Intensive cooperation with legal practice

We believe that the combination of legal practice with academic research bears the most valuable research. For this reason, we closely cooperate with our partners, that possess important know-how of business law and law in action. The partners share this know-how and suggest new research projects. In addition, the extensive national and international networks of the partners are beneficial to the internationalization of the research centre.

The cooperation with legal practice does not affect the institute's full financial and academic independence. Our partners have no influence on the outcome of the research. The academic integrity of the research centre is safeguarded collectively by the board, its partners and the Radboud University Law Faculty.

Our goals

We strive to be the leading Dutch institute in the field of business law, with research that is committed to the legal topics of importance to modern-day businesses and that keeps up with international and European developments.

From this ambition stem the following goals:

1. We conduct excellent academic research in the field of (national and international) business law of the highest academic quality standards
2. We take an excellent understanding of positive law as the basis for our research
3. We are recognized internationally as a centre of excellence
4. We train tomorrow’s best business lawyers and researchers
5. We encourage the practical application and promote the societal impact of our research
6. We have an open research environment with a spirit of co-operation
7. We have a strong national and international research network with partners that support our mission
8. We uphold academic integrity and independence

Strategy 2025

In order to continue fulfilling our mission and research objectives in the coming years, the institute has formulated a strategy.

Integrating sustainability and digitalization
The integration of digitalization challenges demands a focus on the legal aspects of new technology. We aim at strengthening our expertise in this area.

Calibrating our research partners
We want to ensure a balance between partners in the legal services industry and corporate partners that contribute to our mission and goals and strengthen our research partnership with other innovative companies that may contribute to our mission and goals.

Internationalization
Internationalization must keep pace with business oriented law and legal practice, and we stimulate our researchers to publish more internationally.

Research environment
The institute wants to be the greatest place to work for legal scholars in the field of business law.

Academic integrity
We strive for high awareness of the importance of academic integrity among all researchers as academic integrity is an integral part of research quality.

Research communication and valorisation
In the coming years we aim at further enhancing our research communication and improve our international visibility. We encourage our researcher to publish research that could be published open access, is published open access as much as possible.

Organizational structure

The institute has a board which is assisted by a secretary and the financial manager of the Radboud University Faculty of Law.

There is an advisory board, that advises and supervises the board. It consists of representatives of the partners and the Radboud University Law Faculty.

The institute incorporates two specialized research institutes that are linked to two research programmes:

• The Van der Heijden Institute (Company Law)
• The Institute for Financial Law

Many of the staff members of the institute are also connected as lecturers to one of the departments of the Radboud University Faculty of Law, in particular the departments of Private Law and Company Law.

Besides its staff, we also have research fellows. They are connected to the institute as researcher, but have their main employment outside Radboud University.