On Thursday, 25 November 2021, Betty de Hart delivered a lecture at Leiden University as part of the ongoing lecture series organized by the Van Vollenhoven Institute, titled “Reconsidering the Socio-Legal Gaze.” The lecture series aimed to spark critical debates about the visions of justice and positions of power inform Law and Society scholarship at Leiden and beyond. The first semester’s series “Dutch Colonial Foundations” reflected on the birth of socio-legal scholarship in the context of Dutch colonial administration.
Betty de Hart is a professor of transnational families and migration law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She conducts legal, empirical and historical research on the national, European and international rules that transnational families encounter, the views behind these rules as well as the impact on the everyday lives of transnational families. She is the recipient of a 2017 European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for her research project EUROMIX: Regulating Mixed Intimacies in Europe. The project answers the question of whether, how and why ‘mixed’ relationships are regulated in Europe, how ‘mixed’ couples respond to regulation and the role that law and lawyers play in the way in which thinking about “race” has developed in Europe.
The second semester of the series focused on “Future Horizons” of socio-legal scholarship in the context of three key values that drive contemporary scholarship: decolonization, diversity, and development. The year-long lecture series, organized by the Van Vollenhoven Institute Diversity and Inclusion Committee, was open to the public, allowing attendees to join virtually or in person.