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 citizenship, the constitutional democratic state and its values, civic education, immigrant 'integration' policies and interdisciplinary legal research methods. 

Background

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 requirements 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). (For a review by prof. Dora Kostakopoulou, see here.)

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 biennial VWR-dissertation prize for best dissertation in legal philosophy in the Netherlands and Belgium (2019). 

De Waal is the founder of Stichting Civic that aims to provide a fundamentally different 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.

Research interests

• Citizenship
• The constitutional democratic state and its values
• Multi-layered citizenship (city, national, EU and world)
• Integration requirements in EU Member States
• Civic education 
• Research methodology; specifically interdisciplinary legal research combining law, theory and empirics 

Teaching areas

• General Introduction to Law
• Legal Research 
• Legal Philosophy 
• Integration & Citizenship