Martijn Hesselink

Spring 2025 EUI Exchange Visitor

Martijn Hesselink was appointed Professor of Transnational Law and Theory at the European University Institute in September 2019. Prior to joining the EUI, he was Professor of European Private Law at the University of Amsterdam, where he was also the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law. Professor Hesselink is an editor of European Law Open. He served as a member of the European Commission's expert group on European contract law and wrote numerous studies, reports and briefing notes on matters of contract law and consumer law for the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.Professor Hesselink has been a visiting professor or fellow at several universities, including René Descartes (Paris V), Roma Tre, Católica Global School of Law (Lisbon), Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I), Sciences Po (Paris), Columbia Law School (New York), and the Institute for European and Comparative Law (Oxford).

He published many articles, in leading international journals, and several books, including most recently Justifying contract in Europe: political philosophies of European contract law (Oxford University Press, 2021). His current main research interests include: social justice, radical democracy, revolution, and their relationships to law, in particular the private law and constitutional law of the EU. His main approaches to the law are normative and critical.