Wim Voermans is Professor of Constitutional and Administrative law at Leiden University.

More information about Wim Voermans

Wim Voermans is Professor of Constitutional and Administrative law at Leiden University.

Voermans current research focuses on Dutch and European constitutional law, with a particular interest in the Dutch and EU legislature. Focal points in his recent research are: quality of EU legislation, impact assessment, legislative procedures (with a special interest in (European) Parliament’s role), delegation, innovation in legislation and legislative process, transparency, deregulation, simplification, transposition and implementation of EU legislation, compliance and enforcement, drafting techniques, and legislative evaluation). Voermans is one of the three directors of the Leiden Research Profile "Political Legitimacy". 

Curriculum vitae

Professional Career 
Wim Voermans (Zundert 1961) graduated from the Faculty of Law at Tilburg University in 1987. Between 1989 and 2002 he held the position of assistant professor/ lecturer and from 1997 onward as a senior lecturer/associate professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at Tilburg Law School. 

In September 2002 Voermans was appointed to the chair of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the department of Public Law at Leiden University. He chaired the section of Constitutional & Administrative Law and between 2003 and 2005 until he became a member of the board of the Leiden Law Faculty and the Director of the Faculty’s Research Institute (the E.M. Meijers Institute for Legal Studies) (2005-2007). Since 2010 he is the director of the Institute of Public Law and since August 2012 (again) chair of the Section of Constitutional and Administrative Law of Leiden Law School. 

Additional functions

President of the International Association for Legislation ( IAL)
Programme director  (Legislative Method and Drafting) of the Dutch Academy for Legislation
Chairman of the Thorbecke and Bachienestichting (a century old foundation which awards academic prizes in the field of constitutional law, political science and life sciences)
Chairman of the editiorial board of Prakke/Kortmann Constitutional Law of the EU Member States
Member of the advisory board on municipal law of the Dutch Association of Municipalities (former president 2007-2008).
Member of the Dutch platform ICT and Research (Surf).
Member of the advisory board of Legal Intelligence.
Member of the Advisory Board of the Dutch Elections Board (Research department)
Fellow of the Montesquieu Institute (the Hague)
Voermans is on the editorial board of several book series and recollection of Dutch Legislation.

Field of research expertise

Wim Voermans' current field of research expertise is in constitutional law (comparative/European) and legislative studies. Formerly he used to work in the field legimatics (computer-assistance for legislative drafting and ICT support for legislative processes) Leda-project 1990-1995 (PhD-project). 

Legislative studies 
Voermans' research focuses on legislative studies (see archive of publications 1990-2003 and the tab publications). This research involves a host of topics running from the drafting stages of legislation up to the enactment implementation enforcement, and evaluation thereof. Most of the research in period 1992-2003 focused on practical problems of legislation and involved hands-on research. More and more the interaction between EU- and national legislation came to the fore after 1995.

Constitutional Law- comparative studies 
The Constitutional Law research project are mainly comparative in nature. Voermans studied the phenomenon of Councils for the Judiciary in different European Countries, the way different EU Member States implement EC Directives, the regime on access to information in the EU, the way EU Member States deal with codification and consolidation, the way preambles are used (and the effects they have), constitutional reserves, etc. 
This ties in well with the research of the Leiden Law Faculty team of working on the project Trias Europea, led by Voermans. In this project the group is studying shifts in the relative balance of state powers and institutions within the European Union. Is the balance between the executive, legislator and judiciary affected by the gradually progressing constitutionalization of the Union? How is constitutional law forged in the EU? What are the effects of this process and is a new balance warranted? 
These are some of the research questions in the project Trias Europea, one of five projects in the research programme (2003-2010). 

European projects 
In 2004-2006 Mommers and Voermans worked on the LOIS-programme ( Lexal Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing). In this EU-funded research programme (FP 6) different institutes in Europe( Italy, UK, Netherlands, Austria, and Czech Republic) are trying to develop an intelligent thesaurus which enable to find and compare different but equivalent legal concepts in legislation of EU-member states. Ensuingly (2007- 2008) the team worked on the follow-up project (FP 7): DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support ( DALOS).

Publications