Rowie Stolk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. Her research focuses on legal protection in cases involving collective or diffuse interests. From an interdisciplinary perspective, she examines the role of interest groups in the legal system and the position of vulnerable groups and interests within procedural law. Rowie teaches in several bachelor's courses on administrative law and in the master's programme in Constitutional and Administrative Law. She is also one of the coordinators of Empirical Legal Studies in Leiden and serves as one of the faculty coordinators for the interdisciplinarity learning pathway.

More information about Rowie Stolk

Research

Rowie Stolk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. Her research interests lie in judicial proceedings concerning societal issues. She studies, among other things, how interest groups use litigation as a strategy for social, political, or legal change (also known as strategic litigation or public interest litigation). Her work explores the position of vulnerable groups in society and their access to effective legal protection. Rowie’s research is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach to societal themes within a procedural law context.

In April 2024, Rowie defended her PhD dissertation entitled 'Interest Groups in Court: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Access to Justice in the Dutch Polder'. In 2025, she was awarded the VAR-Lex Michiels Prize for this work. This prize is awarded every four years to the author of an original work that has made an outstanding and innovative contribution to the development of Dutch administrative law. In 2019, as part of her PhD research, Rowie spent five months as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She received the Leiden Meijers Prize for her article 'Who Are They…?! The Representativeness of Litigating Interest Groups' (NTB 2020/8), which was chosen as the best article within the faculty research programme Legitimacy and Effectiveness of Law & Governance in a World of Multilevel Jurisdictions. In 2024, she also received the OCA Publication Prize for best journal article on collective actions for her piece 'The General Interest Action at Odds with the General Interest? On the Representativeness of Public Interest Litigants' (NJB 2023/970).

In 2024, Rowie received a starter grant for research on judicial remedies in public interest litigation before administrative and civil courts. That same year, she was also awarded a KIEM grant to develop an interdisciplinary research project. In collaboration with scholars from public administration, she is conducting empirical research on the nature, scale, and strategies of interest groups engaging in strategic litigation.

Rowie is the editorial secretary of JBplus and one of the coordinators of Empirical Legal Studies in Leiden. She is a member of the WODC advisory committee for the evaluation of the Act on the Settlement of Mass Claims in Collective Action (WAMCA) and a comparative legal study on access to justice for public interest organisations.

Teaching

Rowie teaches a variety of courses on administrative law in both the bachelor's and master's degree programme. She previously coordinated the first-year course Introduction to Administrative Law and taught in the third-year course Administrative Procedural Law. She currently coordinates the second-year course Administrative Law and teaches the tutorial on vulnerable interests in administrative law, which is part of the master’s course Administrative Law in Practice, where she also provides law clinic education. She supervises both bachelor’s and master’s theses. Rowie also serves as one of the faculty’s learning pathway coordinators for interdisciplinarity.

Curriculum Vitae

Rowie began her studies in Political Science at Leiden University in 2011. A year later, she also enrolled in the Law programme. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Political Science cum laude in 2014, followed by her bachelor’s in Law in 2015. In 2016, she completed her Master’s in Constitutional and Administrative Law cum laude. During her undergraduate studies, Rowie participated in the Honours College Law. Alongside her Master’s studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law and represented Leiden in the national VAR moot court competition. During her studies, she also gained practical experience working as a paralegal at the law firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek and as a legal intern at Van der Feltz Advocaten.

After completing her studies, she began working in 2016 as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. In 2017, she started her PhD research at the same department, focusing on the legitimacy and effectiveness of access to courts for interest groups. She completed her PhD in 2024. She has been a lecturer at the department since 2022 and was appointed Assistant Professor in  2023.