Tamar de Waal is associate professor (universitair hoofddocent) at the Amsterdam Law School of the University of Amsterdam. She is director of the Amsterdam Honours College of Law. She also writes the In Den Haag-column in De Groene Amsterdammer (triweekly). She is also editorial board member of the journal Beleid & Maatschappij.
She specializes in citizenhip, the constitutional democratic state and its values, civic education, immigrant 'integration' policies and interdisciplinairy legal research methods.
Tamar de Waal is associate professor in legal theory. De Waal has published in a variety of national and international journals and law journals on matters of citizenship and civic integration requiments in EU Member States. She is the author of Integration Requirements for Immigrants in Europe - A Legal-Philosophical Inquiry that was published in 2021 by Hart Publishing (Bloomsbury).
In 2019 she was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. In that year, she also wrote a booklet on the importance of citizenship and citizenship education for Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei. This booklet has been distributed to social studies and civic teachers (docenten maatschappijleer). In 2021-2022 obtained the Urban Citizen Fellowship at NIAS-KNAW and conducted research on urban citizenship and education.
For her dissertation Conditional Belonging, De Waal won the biennal VWR-dissertation prize for best dissertation in legal philosophy in the Netherlands and Belgium (2019).
De Waal is the founder and chairman of Stichting Civic that aims to provide a fundamentally diferent perspective on Dutch civic integration policies ('inburgering') for refugees and other newcomers in the Netherlands. That policy must fit within our constitutional state and facilitate the best possible start of newcomers in society. Stichting Civic resides in the LawHub of the Amsterdam Law School.