Imke Maessen is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Philosophy.

More information about Imke Maessen

Imke Maessen studied both Law and Philosophy at Leiden University. In 2013 she graduated from Law School with an M.A. thesis on denominational education and in 2015 she earned an M.A. in Philosophy with a M.A. thesis on H.L.A. Hart’s concept of law. From February 2016 until February 2018 she worked on the research project “Legislative Secrecy” (supervised by Prof. dr. G.F. Newey) at the Institute for Philosophy of Leiden University. This research formed part of the project “Democratic Secrecy: Philosophical Analysis of the Role of Secrecy in Democratic Governance”  and was funded by the European Research Council. As of February 2018 she started work on her PhD project about the ontological status of laws and the relation between laws and legal subjects. In her research she pays special attention to the communicative, performative, and normative aspects of laws and laws’ dependence on recognition by individual legal subjects. Her doctoral research is supervised by Prof. dr. M.R. Rutgers and Dr. B.J.E. Verbeek.