Team
The ELS Lab thrives on the engagement of its members, offering a collaborative platform for the development and sharing of empirical research skills and methods, and provides accessible support for questions both big and small regarding empirical legal studies. The lab welcomes everyone, regardless of background or experience.
Below you find an overview of the members of our core team, de steering group and the ELS community.
Core team
- Paulien de Winter works as an associate professor of Legal Theory at the Department of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and Legal Theory at Utrecht University. As a researcher, she is affiliated with the Montaigne Centre. She is also endowed professor of Regulatory Enforcement at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on empirical legal studies, with particular emphasis on enforcement and supervision. She investigates how executive staff apply rules in practice, such as in the social domain, often using methods like interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and surveys.
Paulien studied sociology and received her doctorate at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen with her socio-legal research ‘Between the Lines’ on the enforcement of social security legislation. She serves as a board member of the Dutch Association for Socio-Legal Studies (VSR), is an editorial board member of the European Journal for Empirical Legal Studies (EJELS) and the Tijdschrift voor Toezicht (TvT), and is a regular contributor to the Ars Aequi KwartaalSignaal Rechtssociologie. - Lydia Dalhuisen is an associate professor of forensic psychiatry and criminal law at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law Sciences. She completed both her master’s in Clinical and Health Psychology and her master’s in Criminal Law at Utrecht University, focusing her teaching and research on the intersection between psychology and law. In 2016, she earned her PhD with research on arson, specifically addressing the individualization, identification, and treatment of arsonists.
Within the research cluster Empirical Research into Institutions for conflict resolution (ERI), she started an empirical legal research line in 2021 on restorative justice and the position of victims in forensic psychiatry. Her interdisciplinary research, which emphasizes practical and social relevance, employs a mixed-method approach — applying both qualitative and quantitative empirical methods, including thematic analysis of interviews, vignette studies and focus groups with Nvivo, as well as statistical analysis of surveys and case file research using SPSS.
Currently, Lydia is affiliated as a researcher with the Utrecht Center for Accountability and Liability Law (UCALL). She also serves as deputy judge at the Amsterdam District Court and is on the editorial board of both the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology and the Journal of Restorative Justic - Stijn van Deursen is an assistant professor at the Molengraaff Institute for Private Law at Utrecht University. He completed his Master of Law and Regulation at Utrecht and defended his dissertation in January 2025. His research focuses on judicial decision-making, specifically examining how judges shape the interaction between liability law, politics, and society. For Stijn, understanding empirical realities is crucial for developing well-founded normative legal theory, making methodological innovation an essential part of his research.
Drawing on insights from the social sciences and humanities, he developed an innovative layered approach to identifying relevant case law using regular expressions and PowerGREP. He applies diverse qualitative analysis methods, including content analysis and thematic analysis, to conduct structured jurisprudence studies with NVivo. Stijn has also conducted interview research, utilizing Amberscript for transcription and NVivo for thematic analysis. He is a member of the expert group on judicial decision-making of the Dutch Council for the Judiciary and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration through his membership in the research group Behavior & Institutions. - Anne Janssen is affiliated as a PhD candidate with the Montaigne Centre for the Rule of Law and Administration of Justice. She has a legal background (Legal Research Master) and experience with both qualitative (interviews, focus groups, participatory observations) and quantitative research methods (surveys, systematic case law analysis). In her PhD research, she combines insights from social psychology and law to map the experience and legal position of vulnerable litigants in civil procedures.
As part of her research, she has conducted nearly 300 interviews with self-represented litigants in civil cases and visitors of the Legal Aid Office. Anne primarily uses Nvivo for coding her interviews (thematic analysis) and has previously worked with SPSS, Excel, and R for interpreting quantitative research results. The use of empirical methods is central to her research, as it translates the perspective of vulnerable groups in society into the legal domain and includes underrepresented research participants in legal scholarship.
This interdisciplinary approach by Anne reflects the broader mission of the Montaigne Centre to conduct socially relevant multidimensional research into rule of law and administration of justice. - Lilian van Karnenbeek is a researcher at the Utrecht University Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law. She is trained in social geography and spatial planning and has specialized in environmental law, with a particular focus on the Omgevingswet. Her research lies at the intersection of spatial planning and environmental law, emphasizing (the financing of) climate adaptation.
A significant part of her research involves case studies, where specific areas are studied in depth. She employs various research methods including content analysis, (semi-structured) interviews, and participatory observation, supplemented by software tools such as Nvivo. Lilian is also experienced with Q-methodology, a systematic approach to mapping and visualizing subjectivity. For her, the value of empirical research is in understanding the application and effects of (environmental) law in practice. - Sophie Melchers is a researcher at the Institute of Jurisprudence, Constitutional and Administrative Law and at the Utrecht University Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law (UCWOSL) where she focusses on sustainability transitions. Her PhD thesis examined the legal (im)possibilities of reusing wastewater. She has a legal background in international and European (administrative) law, as well as a thorough background in quantitative research methods and statistics, both acquired at Tilburg University.
From 2016 to 2019, she taught quantitative research methods – ranging from ‘what is a correlation?’ to complex mediation and moderation models – and led SPSS lab sessions. She also has experience in setting up and conducting Social Network Analyses (SNA) in R within legal research. Her research builds on environmental legal research, but she also collaborates extensively with researchers from the natural sciences. She is therefore able to apply her quantitative background as a methodology in her own research, but it is also crucial for her to collaborate effectively with the natural sciences and other non-lawyers. - Cristiana Santos is an Assistant Professor in data protection and online privacy and an affiliated researcher with RENFORCE (the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe). Her research focuses on the developer-centered privacy, dark patterns and manipulation of consumers and business users, and compliance of online tracking technologies with GDPR/ePrivacy Directive, DSA, and DMA.
Understanding empirical realities is crucial for developing well-founded data protection law. To assess whether legal requirements are implemented into a concrete technology, she collaborates with computer scientists to apply computational methods, including web measurements, automated website audits, network traffic analysis, and tools for detecting hidden data collection.
Her research incorporates human-computer interaction methods to understand how users (both consumers and business users) perceive and engage with digital systems. Drawing on user studies, user interface (UI), user experience (UX) and expert analysis, she investigates whether legal concepts, such as informed consent, are meaningful in practice and how interface design may influence users’ decision-making and autonomy.
By systematically combining legal requirements with empirical evidence from technical systems and user behaviour, Cristiana identifies gaps between regulatory expectations and real-world practices, contributing to evidence-based regulation and enforcement of digital technologies.
Steering group
Community
As a UU employee, you can become part of the ELS Lab community by adding 'empirical legal research' as an expertise to your employee profile page.
