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Johan Wolswinkel appointed as Professor of Administrative Law, Market and Data

Published: 05th November 2018 Last updated: 30th April 2019

PRESS RELEASE 5 November 2018 - Tilburg University has appointed Dr. Johan Wolswinkel as Professor of Administrative Law, Market and Data at Tilburg Law School, effective November 1, 2018. Wolswinkel will be conducting research into the role of administrative law in times of economization, digitalization, and datafication.

The chair of Administrative Law, Market and Data operates on the interface of economic administrative law and administrative information law. Wolswinkel wants to focus his research on the dynamics and complexity of new forms of government action, such as ‘market-driven’ and ‘data-driven’ governance, and the way in which administrative law facilitates and regulates such government action. Information and the underlying data prove to be crucial in this context for organizing markets and allocating so-called limited public rights. For instance, transparency is very important to create equal opportunities among market operators, but the question remains what information or data must be provided to guarantee these equal opportunities.

In addition, Wolswinkel is interested in the interaction between these fields of administrative law and other fields of administrative law. Some aspects of the (market) organizing or allocating function of administrative law require different rules than those that apply elsewhere in administrative law. And the question arises whether newly developed rules in ‘digital’ administrative law, for instance, on the transparency and the logic in automated decision-making by the administration, should also apply in other, ‘analogous’ fields of administrative law. Thus, Wolswinkel hopes to contribute with his research not only to the development of economic administrative law and administrative information law to data-oriented administrative law, but also to the consistency of administrative law as a whole. 

Professor C.J. (Johan) Wolswinkel (1982) studied  Law and Mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and earned a cum laude PhD there in 2013 with a thesis entitled 'De verdeling van schaarse publiekrechtelijke rechten. Op zoek naar algemene regels van verdelingsrecht' [The allocation of limited public rights. In search of general rules of allocation law] with an NWO Top Talent grant. This thesis won him the 2017 VAR prize for best publication in the field of administrative law in the period between 2013 and 2016. Since October 2015, he has been working at Tilburg Law School as an Associate Professor of Administrative Law. Together with Professor Anne Meuwese, he heads the NWO-MVI research project ‘Citizen-friendly data communication by public actors’. Furthermore, his research interests include the distributing function of administrative law, for instance, in the allocation of limited rights by the administration. In addition to his work in Tilburg, he works, among other things, as a deputy judge at the District Court of Rotterdam and a research partner at the Netherlands Gaming Authority (Kansspelautoriteit).

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