Niels Van Dijk

Niels van Dijk is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy and Legal Sociology at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and a senior researcher at the Centre for Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS). He also serves as Director of the Brussels Laboratory for Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessments (d.pia.lab).

Van Dijk’s research explores the legal challenges posed by digital technologies, with a focus on privacy, data protection, intellectual property rights, and legal personhood. His work lies at the intersection of legal philosophy, science and technology studies (STS), and the governance of digital innovation. His research interests further include risk assessment, privacy by design, innovation ethics, data-driven healthcare, techno-constitutionalism, and the ethnography of legal institutions. He is the author of the books ‘Grounds of the Immaterial: A Conflict-Based Approach to Intellectual Rights’ (2017) and ‘Law, Morality and Digital Ethics’ (2025).

Niels van Dijk holds a PhD in Law from the VUB, as well as LLM and MA degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. He has been a visiting researcher at: the Law Faculty of the University of Münster (Germany), the Centre for Advanced Study of the Academy of Science in Oslo (Norway), the Digital Security Department at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands), the Law Department of the London School of Economics (UK), and the Philosophy Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).