André Nollkaemper is Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. In December 2020, the Board of the University of Amsterdam renewed his deanship for a second term.
Since 1998, Andre Nolkaemper has been Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. He continues to hold this chair during his deanship. In 1999, he established the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL), which has become a centre of excellence at the University of Amsterdam and ranks amongst the top institutions for international law in the Netherlands.
In 2012 he was elected as life-long Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.. In 2017 he was elected as life-long Member of the Institut de Droit International.
Between 2010 and 2020 he was external Legal Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. He also was Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (2014-2020) and President of the European Society of International Law (2014-207), His practical experience includes cases before the European Court on Human Rights, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, courts of the Netherlands and consultancy for a variety of international and national organisations. From 1998 to 2010 he was of-counsel at Bohler, attorneys in Amsterdam.
In the academic year 2020-2021 Andre Nollkaemper was visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies; he also has been visiting professor at the University of Oslo.
André Nollkaemper is a leading scholar in international law who has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the international rule of law. In an era where major policy areas have decisively shifted from the domestic to the international level, developing an international rule of law is a critical challenge for states and communities around the world.
His contributions have been particularly ground-breaking on the topic of international responsibility. While the rule of law presupposes that actors who cause harm are responsible, the complex nature of global governance makes such responsibility often elusive. In a groundbreaking article published in 2003, he identified how individuals and states can be concurrently responsible for wrongdoing. With the support of an ERC advanced grant, Nollkaemper expanded this research to the unexplored phenomenon that multiple actors (states, organizations, and individuals) can share responsibility for harm in relation to, for instance, armed conflict, climate change and migration. Drawing from adjacent disciplines, he identified the limits of the prevailing paradigms pertaining to international responsibility and supplemented them with the new perspective of shared responsibility. This work culminated in the 2020 Guiding Principles on Shared Responsibility in International Law.
Nollkaemper produced further breakthroughs on the topic of interactions between international and national law. Recognizing that a key barrier to the international rule of law was the legal separation of the domestic from the international sphere, Nollkaemper advanced a new paradigm that exposed the interfaces between international and domestic law. He focused on the key roles of domestic courts to connect international and domestic law. Recognizing that data on the practice of domestic courts were lacking, Nollkaemper developed International Law in Domestic Courts (ILDC), a unique database with Oxford UP compiling hitherto unavailable data. Under Nollkaemper’s leadership, ILDC comprises reporters in over 100 states and has produced over 3,000 reports. He led several international research groups that used these data and he synthesized the findings in his 2011 monograph on national courts and the international rule of law that fundamentally transformed the understanding of interactions between international and domestic law.
In addition to these fields of law, throughout his academic career Nollkaemper has contributed to our understanding how international law can be used to strengthen the protection of the global environment. His work has addressed projection of international watercourses, marine pollution, climate change, engendered species and animal welfare.
André Nollkaemper has published widely on many different aspects of international law. See fro a full list under the tab publications below. Key publications include: