Gitta Veldt has been a member of the Civil Law Department of the Institute for Private Law since December 2012, first as PhD-fellow and assistant professor, and currently as associate professor.

More information about Gitta Veldt

She is specialized in the interaction between EU regulatory law, standardization and private law in relation to products.

She is a member of the Empirical Legal Studies team. She is currently involved in a project regarding compliance with and enforcement of product safety law in supply chains and e-commerce, and the role of private law in that regard. Digitalization changes supply chains and increases the role of online platforms. Better insight in the perceptions of new actors in these markets with regard to their regulatory responsibilities and their contracts, may enhance the safety, sustainability and consumer protection.

Beside safety, sustainability and circularity have become key goals in product law, which raises the question regarding the relationship between these goals, how they can be embedded in the regulatory landscape and how private law may facilitate these transitions within product law. To answer this question, the relationship between law and behaviour remains key, and it requires the translation insights from other disciplines to product regulation and the private law domain.

Digitalisation (AI and smart products), sustainability and circularity also change product characteristics and new applications (such as drones) introduce new risks that require adjustment or reinterpretation of the legal framework. She has published a lot on product liability.

Moreover, she investigates how research in other disciplines may inform private law, in particular the normative considerations in a private law context, like for legal reasoning in negligence cases or regarding the burden of proof, through which she hopes to enrich and sharpen the doctrinal debate.

These themes are not only core to her own research, but also present in the projects of the PhD student she supervises. She is also editor of an edited volume with Elgar under the title ‘Empirics and Consumer Law in Changing Markets’.  She tries to integrate her research with teaching. As responsible coordinator in the Empirical Legal Studies team, she is point of contact for teachers who want to integrate empirical legal research, interdisciplinarity and corresponding skills in the curriculum.

She developed the course Regulation, behaviour and private law together with professor Willem van Boom and is coordinator and teaching this course. She is involved mainly in the Civil Law Master, but also the bachelor curriculum.

She is a member of the Dutch Jurist Association (NJV), Civil Law Association (VBR) and one of the contributors to the Dutch Journal for Civil Law (NTBR).  

She graduated from Maastricht University in 2008 and worked in private practice for almost four years at a midsize law firm in Rotterdam. She completed her PhD at Leiden University in June 2020, titled European Product Safety Standards and Private Law Standard setting, the year in which she also won the Meijers Prize and Van Wersch Springplank prize.

Specialties: European Regulatory Law and Product Safety in particular and its interaction with  European and National Contract and Tort Law, Empirical Legal Studies Civil Procedural law/Litigation. 

Contributing to SDG 3 (healthy lives and well-being), SDG 9 (fostering innovation) en SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production).

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