Benjamin van Rooij is Professor of Chinese Law and Regulation at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Law. Concurrently, he is director of the Netherlands China Law Centre. By affiliation, he is also Hauser Global Faculty member of NYU Law School, Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies Centre for Regulation and Governance, Fellow at the Law and Society Centre at Koguan Law School at Jiaotong University, and Permanent Guest Professor at Yunnan University School of Law. His expertise covers Chinese law, law enforcement, compliance, lawmaking, access to justice, law and development, and socio-legal theory.

Van Rooij studied Law and Chinese language and culture at Leiden University. He obtained his PhD with honors in 2006 in Leiden, with his dissertation Regulating Land and Pollution in China: Lawmaking, Compliance and Enforcement, Theory and Cases. Van Rooij worked at Leiden University's Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development from 2000, where he was lecturer/researcher and - from 2006-2009 -university lecturer. Over the past years, he has served as an adviser to the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment. Van Rooij has lectured in the Netherlands and abroad on topics related to Chinese Law, Environmental Law, Sociology of Law, Comparative Law, Legal Anthropology, and Law and Development.

Benjamin van Rooij's research focuses on processes of lawmaking and implementation of law, with a particular focus on compliance and enforcement. Areas of research include land management and zoning, pollution regulation, labor law, tax collection, and food safety. The research is interdisciplinary, combining legal with social-scientific methods and theories. It is also comparative, relating findings from China to data from Europe, the US, Australia, Asia, and Latin America. The research is conducted in collaboration with international partners including scholars from the London School of Economics, University of California Berkeley, Oxford University, Yunnan University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China University of Politics and Law. His work has been published in leading journals including Law & Policy, Environment and Planning A, the Journal of Contemporary China, and Development and Change. At present, he is project leader and supervisor of four NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) projects awarded Co-REACH, WOTRO, Mozaïek, and VENI grants.


Inaugural Lecture:
On 24 February 2011, Benjamin van Rooij, Professor of Chinese Law and Regulation, delivered his Inaugural Lecture, entitled: The People's Regulation. A link to the digital version of this lecture can be found below (see 'Refer to').