Professor Family Law. Expert in unmarried cohabiting partners

Wendy Schrama has been a professor of family law and comparative law at Utrecht University since 1 March 2016 and a research leader at the Family & Law Pearl, which is being conducted by UCERF (Utrecht Center for European Research into Family Law). Her specific expertise concerns the legal position of unmarried cohabiting partners; she gives many courses on the subject to the legal profession, the judiciary and notarial profession.

Family relations and the establishment of the law

Schrama studied law in Nijmegen, Dublin and Utrecht (cum laude). In 2004 she obtained her PhD at Utrecht University with Prof. Katharina Boele-Woelki on a comparative law dissertation into unmarried cohabitation in Dutch and German law. Prior to her dissertation, she wrote a monograph in the Practice and Law series (property law for unmarried partners). Her Veni research focused on the question to what extent empirical and sociological data on family relationships are important for the structure of (family) law, and what methodological pitfalls there arise. Other areas of research in which she has published include descent law, surrogacy, partner alimony, polygamous marriages, marriage and registered partnership and empirical family law.

After her promotion, Schrama was associate professor for several years at the Molengraaff Institute for Private Law. In 2010 she also held the TPR swivel chair at the University of Antwerp. In 2010, Schrama went to the WODC (Ministry of Security and Justice), where she was a senior investigator and led research in the broad field of civil law. In 2012 she was appointed professor by special appointment of personal, family and juvenile law at the University of Groningen. In 2013, Schrama switched to VU University Amsterdam as senior lecturer in family and property law.

Wish: large-scale multidisciplinary cooperation for good legislation and targeted family policy

Over the years, Schrama has worked on many major research projects in the broad field of family law. Her focus is on how the law can be structured in such a way that family relationships can function as well as possible. This explicitly concerns a broad perspective, not only focused on family law, but also on other areas of law that are of great importance for family relationships, such as social security law, tax law and pension law. Her wish is a large-scale multidisciplinary collaboration in which the knowledge from the various disciplines (economics, sociology, history, social geography, etc.) is used to provide input for the development of good legislation and targeted family policy. It would be nice if science and policy were given knowledge and insight by science, making evidence-based legislation possible. Wendy Schrama is involved in the research project 'Where do I belong?'.