Postdoctoral researcher in transnational environmental litigation

Job opportunity for an Postdoctoral Researcher working on transnational environmental litigation, in the department of Public Law and Governance (PLG). The position is attached to the TransLitigate Project headed by Dr. Phillip Paiement and funded by an ERC Starting Grant. PLG is a large, diverse and interdisciplinary department, home to nearly 100 academic staff and a range of legal and social science disciplines. You will develop and grow in teaching as well as research, both individually and as part of a team of ambitious scholars.

Job description
Tilburg Law School is interested in hiring a Postdoctoral Research to collaborate on the TransLitigate Project led by Dr. Phillip Paiement. The project focuses on analyzing the agency of transnational strategic litigators in various fields of environmental governance, including climate change, large-scale land transitions, pollution related to extractives industries, and biodiversity conservation. The project combines doctrinal, comparative and socio-legal methods to study forms and patterns of collaboration among strategic litigators in these fields. It seeks to follow transnational litigation networks across multitudes of jurisdictions in diverse socio-economic and political contexts.  

Candidates for this vacancy should have a proven track record of conducting qualitative socio-legal research in one or more of the fields listed above, with preference for scholars who have worked on legal mobilizations around land disputes and biodiversity conservation. Ideally, you will have worked on litigation-related aspects of these fields of law, and/or have had experience with qualitative socio-legal methods of research. Candidates with research or practical legal experience or expertise in South and/or Southeast Asia are preferred.  

As part of this position you will be a member of the Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene research community at Tilburg Law School. This research community, founded in 2019, includes researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – legal theory, environmental law, political science, socio-legal studies – who are concerned with the evolving role of law in the Anthropocene. It includes research on issues of legal and political representation of Nature and future generations, the regulation of emergent technologies, and institutional questions about law’s historic and contemporary role in facilitating the conditions of the Anthropocene. Likewise, you will be welcome to join in a newly emerging research community focused on the ‘Global Legal Professional.’ Both research communities are members of PLG’s Global Law and Governance research programme at Tilburg Law School.

This position consists predominantly of research (90%), with limited opportunities for education (10%) in the the Global Law LLB, Rechtsgeleerdheid LLB, International Law and Global Governance LLM and the European Law and Global Risk LLM.