The lecture was also Betty's inaugural lecture as professor of Transnational Families and Migration Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
In her lecture, she addressed the question of how racial thinking was part of the Dutch legal system and legal scholarship as a way of exploring the 'legal archive'. She also discussed the legal work on race and mixture of three Dutch jurists: L.W.C. van den Berg (1845-1927), a colonial legislator who wrote the Mixed Marriages Act for the Dutch East Indies; W.F. Wertheim (1907-1998), a professor of colonial law who later distanced himself from the Dutch colonial system of which he had been a part; and H. de Bie (1879-1955), who, as the first children's judge in Rotterdam, was concerned about Dutch girls and their intimate relationships with Chinese men. The study argues that understanding our legal past (the 'legal archive') is crucial to advancing our knowledge of how race and mixture work in the law today, and that such knowledge is vital for social justice.
The Sarah van Walsum lecture is the annual opening of the Master’s program in International Migration and Refugee Law and commemorates our late colleague Sarah van Walsum.