Niels Van Dijk

Niels van Dijk is a lecturer in legal philosophy and legal sociology at the faculty of law & criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB). He is also a senior researcher at the VUB Centre for Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS) within the strategic research program ‘Articulating Law, Technology, Ethics and Politics beyond the GDPR’. Niels van Dijk is director of the Brussels Laboratory for Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessments (d.pia.lab). He is the author of the award-winning monograph “Grounds of the Immaterial. A Conflict-Based Approach to Intellectual Rights”.

Niels van Dijk has been a researcher in several national and European (FP 6 & 7, H2020, FWO) interdisciplinary research projects on the challenges digital technologies pose to practices of law, especially privacy, data protection, intellectual rights and legal personhood. More broadly, his research is situated at the intersection between legal philosophy, science and technology studies (STS), and governance of digital innovation, where he is interested in the role and nature of law in a changing technological world. Other current fields of interest include: impact assessment, privacy by design, ethics of innovation, techno-constitutionalism, and ethnography of legal institutions.

He holds a PhD degree in law by the VUB, and LLM and MA (cum laude) degrees in law and philosophy by the University of Amsterdam. In the past, he has been a (visiting) researcher at the digital security department of Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), the law department of the London School of Economics (UK), and the philosophy department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES).