Department of Private, Business & Labour Law (PBLL)

Welcome to the Department of Private, Business & Labour Law, at the crossroads of private relationships, entrepreneurship and sustainability. Our department aims to provide high-quality research and education in private law, business law and labour law.

Team up with our research activities

In the triangle of Private, Business and Labour Law our department conducts innovative and original research within our Signature Plan Connecting Organizations, connecting the key areas of expertise of our department, combined with Fiscal Law. In the Signature Plan we investigate how new models and strategies of organizing business and economic activities (e.g. platforms, networks, blockchains) are regulated by the law and whether that regulation needs rethinking in the light of modern society, in which sustainability, technology and servitization become ever more dominant drivers of change.
Existing legal frameworks, including rules stemming from contract law, company law, insolvency law, labour law, (intellectual) property law, tax law, and/or tort law, may not sit well with these developments. Accordingly, they can impede innovation.
However, the legitimate interests that these legal frameworks safeguard (e.g. social rights for consumers and workers) may require updating or new interpretation of the underpinning rules in order to ensure continued protection.

Our department is successful in securing research funding from, inter alia, personal funding from NWO, and funding from Horizon 2020. Our researchers have furthermore written research reports for, among others, the WODC and various ministries. Our researchers are active in national and international research. While our primary focus is on legal research, we actively encourage interdisciplinary research.

We stimulate collaboration in research and create added value for society by bringing the right people together to work on challenging and meaningful problems and by developing innovative solutions.

Read more about our research

Study with us

In line with our research the department of Private, Business & Labour Law teaches a large proportion of courses in the bachelor and master of Dutch Law, and the Global Law Bachelor program. The Department furthermore coordinates and teaches the bachelor Dutch Business Law and the English master programs International Business Law and Labour law and Employment Relations.

In addition, we provide a large number of courses within other programs of Tilburg Law School, and for Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tias Business School and the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS).