Team

Marija teaches several courses, including ‘Private law in European and International Perspective’ and ‘Law as a Change-Maker’. Marija’s research agenda revolves around the relationship between law and social change.

Within the framework of her ERC Starting Grant for a project titled ‘Law as a Vehicle of Social Change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices’, Marija focuses on the question how private law could nurture socially and environmentally non-extractive economic practices.

At present, Marija is completing a manuscript titled ‘Toward a New Collective Imaginary’, which aims to articulate the imaginary that will come to replace the neoliberal one.

As part of the N-EXTLAW team Vladimir works on questions of how private law structures work relations, focusing on worker cooperatives as an alternative model of organising economic activity and work. He is interested in critical approaches to law, participatory action research (PAR), organising and social movements.

Prior to joining the UvA Vladimir was a postdoctoral fellow at the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his doctorate from the Hertie School in Berlin and completed the Doctoral Programme “Unity and Difference in the European Legal Area” at the Humboldt University European Law School. He holds a Masters Degree in European and International Law (LLM.Eur) from the University of Bremen, and an LLB from the Ss Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. Prior to his doctoral studies, Vladimir spent several years working for the German Trade Union Confederation, counselling and assisting migrant workers with the Fair Mobility Project.

Nena is a Dutch scholar with a background in private law and economics. She obtained both her master’s degree in law and her master’s degree in economics at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She is interested in CSR, corporate social purpose, profit, legal forms for social enterprises, steward ownership, not-for-profit enterprise, and empirical legal research.

Within the N-EXTLAW project, Nena’s PhD research studies the decisions that enterprises with a social purpose can make with regard to their profit distributions, and how the legal framework can support more socially responsible profit distributions. Nena conducts case studies, in which she conducts interviews and does observations in enterprises.

As part of the N-EXTLAW team, Mario works on the identification of the Italian community of non-extractive enterprises. He also studies the Italian public and private legal infrastructure that enables or obstructs the non-extractive economy and develops the public law dimension of the project, including aspects of public procurement, tax, and administrative law. Mario is interested in combining traditional doctrinal methods of legal analysis with qualitative and archival methods of socio-legal research, including participatory action research (PAR). Mario is also interested in emphasising the ‘law in action’ dimension of his research, with special attention to social movements.

Prior to joining the UvA, Mario did his PhD at the Law department of the European University Institute (EUI) of Florence. His PhD dissertation focused on the legal mobilisation strategies deployed by environmental NGOs to overcome the Plaumann test in EU environmental and climate litigation before the European Court of Justice. At the EUI, Mario founded and coordinated the ‘Engaged Academics’ Working Group, aiming to bridge the young scholars of the Institute with the local civil society of Florence and its surroundings. Prior to his doctoral studies, Mario worked in Brussels as a bluebook trainee at DG ENV of the European Commission, in the infringement proceedings unit. He also holds an LLM in European Law from the College of Europe (Bruges) and a Bachelor’s/Master’s combined degree in Law from the Università Cattolica of Milan.

While currently employed as a Project and Policy Manager at the Lifelong Learning Platform (an advocacy EU-NGO promoting lifelong learning in Europe), she has spent years conducting research on systemic change and the new economy. She started a research internship at N-EXTLAW in January 2023 with the aim to better understand what defines and differentiates environmental, social and economic extractivism practices from non-extractivism practices using an interdisciplinary approach. 

Before moving to Geneva, Giacomo studied law in Turin and London and interned at the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization. He joined the N-EXTLAW project as an intern in February 2023.