Anniek de Ruijter
- Professor of Health Law and Policy (Amsterdam Law School)
Anniek de Ruijter is Professor of Health Law and Policy at the Amsterdam Law School. Her work examines how law can improve and protect human health, and where the legal limits lie on public and medical authority in the face of vulnerability. She works at the intersection of EU law, public health, and governance, initiated and leads Law for Health & Life at the University of Amsterdam.
At the European University Institute, her research will develop a line of work on EU law for health solidarity. It focuses on the legal and institutional conditions under which the European Union can build, support, and share national and cross-border health solidarity in the context of ageing populations, rising costs, workforce and medicine shortages, and widening health inequalities. Combining legal analysis with qualitative case studies and public health approaches, the project aims to produce actionable legal and institutional blueprints for EU capacity-building, knowledge-sharing, and resource pooling, and to clarify when EU intervention can strengthen, rather than undermine, solidaristic health systems.
Previously, her research traced legal and institutional pathways through which EU authority in public health and health care expands towards more central levels of governance and the implications for rights and accountability (EU Health Law & Policy: The Expansion of EU Power in Public Health and Health Care, Oxford University Press, 2019). She has studied EU legal responses to infectious disease outbreaks and health emergencies, including work on the influenza A(H1N1) outbreak, EU health-security policy, and the norms and techniques of crisis and disaster governance. Since 2018, she has pursued comparative and qualitative research on the interaction between international, regional, and national regimes for infectious disease control and emergency response, including solidarity across borders and access to medicines. She works on the regulation of the food-environment to be able to measure the offerings of unhealthy foods in urban environments and designing EU, national and municipal regulatory approaches for safeguarding access to healthy food in EU cities.
Furthermore, she is in the lead of the recently opened multi-stakeholder research lab in Amsterdam: ELSA Lab AI for health equity.
She holds law degrees (with honours) from the University of Amsterdam and as a Fulbright fellow, from Columbia Law School. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, Columbia Law School, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She serves Academic Council of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, co-leads a University of Amsterdam Research Priority Area on Global Health and AI health decision-making, leads research in Horizon consortia on pandemic preparedness and vaccine access, and serves on the board of the Gastein Forum, and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. She is chair of an arbitral court for health insurance disputes in the Netherlands, and she is board member of Bureau Clara Wichmann, litigation for Women’s Rights.
At the European University Institute, her research will develop a line of work on EU law for health solidarity. It focuses on the legal and institutional conditions under which the European Union can build, support, and share national and cross-border health solidarity in the context of ageing populations, rising costs, workforce and medicine shortages, and widening health inequalities. Combining legal analysis with qualitative case studies and public health approaches, the project aims to produce actionable legal and institutional blueprints for EU capacity-building, knowledge-sharing, and resource pooling, and to clarify when EU intervention can strengthen, rather than undermine, solidaristic health systems.
Previously, her research traced legal and institutional pathways through which EU authority in public health and health care expands towards more central levels of governance and the implications for rights and accountability (EU Health Law & Policy: The Expansion of EU Power in Public Health and Health Care, Oxford University Press, 2019). She has studied EU legal responses to infectious disease outbreaks and health emergencies, including work on the influenza A(H1N1) outbreak, EU health-security policy, and the norms and techniques of crisis and disaster governance. Since 2018, she has pursued comparative and qualitative research on the interaction between international, regional, and national regimes for infectious disease control and emergency response, including solidarity across borders and access to medicines. She works on the regulation of the food-environment to be able to measure the offerings of unhealthy foods in urban environments and designing EU, national and municipal regulatory approaches for safeguarding access to healthy food in EU cities.
Furthermore, she is in the lead of the recently opened multi-stakeholder research lab in Amsterdam: ELSA Lab AI for health equity.
She holds law degrees (with honours) from the University of Amsterdam and as a Fulbright fellow, from Columbia Law School. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, Columbia Law School, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She serves Academic Council of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, co-leads a University of Amsterdam Research Priority Area on Global Health and AI health decision-making, leads research in Horizon consortia on pandemic preparedness and vaccine access, and serves on the board of the Gastein Forum, and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. She is chair of an arbitral court for health insurance disputes in the Netherlands, and she is board member of Bureau Clara Wichmann, litigation for Women’s Rights.