Daniel Bertram is a socio-legal scholar working across law, science and technology studies, and political sociology to understand how legal mechanisms and vocabularies mediate the relationships between society and the natural environment. As a post-doctoral researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Daniel’s work is situated in the ERC-funded DigiFood project, which analyses how different forms of data governance in the food and agriculture sector affect power dynamics and configure the future of food.

In the context of his PhD research at the European University Institute, Daniel examined how the idea of criminalising “ecocide” has been mobilised and translated into a variety of institutional formats over the past decade. Building on four years of ethnographic study with activists, politicians, and legal experts, his thesis retraces why and how different actors imagine ecocide as an adequate response to different socio-environmental grievances, and how these imaginaries configure the space for legal and political contestation of the Anthropocene more broadly. Preliminary results have been published in the Journal of Environmental Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research and blogs such as EJIL:Talk!, Verfassungsblog, and Opinio Juris.

Daniel’s previous work focused on, among others, the legal principle of intergenerational equity in climate litigation, the governance landscape of environmental and human rights due diligence, and the prospects and pitfalls of transnational environmental lawsuits and has appeared in both legal and political science journals. 

Supported by a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Daniel studied Global Law (LLB) and Public Governance (BSc) at Tilburg University and Law (MPhil) at the University of Oxford. During his PhD studies at the European University Institute, he completed research visits at the University of Trento, the Scuola Normale Superiore, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Colegio de México, and the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich.

For the past four years, Daniel has been an assistant editor for the journal Transnational Environmental Law. Next to his academic engagements, he regularly follows and reports on multilateral environmental negotiations as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.