Dr. Laura Burgers (1989) works as assistant professor at the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative private law (ACT) of the University of Amsterdam’s private law department. Her research interests include climate change litigation, democratic theory, rights of future generations and rights of nature. She is one of the experts in the UN program Harmony with Nature on the rights of nature.

Burgers joined ACT’s predecessor, the European Centre for the Study of European Contract Law (CSECL) as a PhD candidate in 2016. In 2020, she defended her PhD thesis entitled Justitia, the Peoples' Power and Mother Earth; Democratic legitimacy of judicial law-making in European private law cases on climate change, which was supervised by prof. dr. C. Mak & prof. dr. M. Bartl. This PhD research was embedded in Mak’s Vidi-project Judges in Utopia – Judicial law-making in European private law.

Burgers has graduated from the University of Amsterdam (Research Master in Public International Law & Bachelor of Arts in French Language and Culture). Benefiting from exchange programs, she also studied French law at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) and international law at New York University (United States of America). For her PhD research, she stayed four months a the University of Oslo (Norway). In 2022, she received a Rubicon grant.

See also http://www.lauraburgers.nl (in Dutch)