Dr Wendy Yan is Assistant Professor Constitutional Law and affiliated with the Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice. Her research focuses on the interaction between courts and the legislature within Dutch constitutional law, with particular attention to the effects of court decisions on legislation and administrative practice. Within this domain, she examines the role of courts within the separation of powers and conducts empirical legal research on constitutional/institutional interactions. In November 2025, she obtained her PhD with the dissertation Rechterlijke terugkoppeling. Een empirisch-juridische studie naar de interactie tussen rechter en wetgever in het licht van de trias politica in Nederland (Boom Juridisch). For more information, see the Research section.

Her methodological expertise lies in integrating doctrinal legal research with empirical and computational approaches. She applies qualitative methods, including semistructured interviews and grounded theory, and combines these with systematic case law analysis and quantitative techniques. As an ODISSEI SoDa Fellow, she focuses on computational methods for legal research, including large-scale text analysis and machine learning.

She teaches constitutional and administrative law and supervises bachelor’s and master’s theses. In addition, she teaches empirical legal methods, including Advanced Empirical Legal Studies within the Legal Research Master.

CV:

Priorly, Wendy worked as lecturer and PhD Candidate at the same department. She holds an MSc in Research in Public Administration and Organizational Science (Utrecht University, 2021), an LL.M. in European Law (Leiden University, 2020), an LL.B. in Law (honours; Leiden University, 2017), and a BSc in Public Administration Science: Policy, Public Administration and Organisation (honours; Leiden University, 2016). During her studies, she spent a semester abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing (China) and completed an internship at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy.