Jesse Claassen

Jesse Claassen works as lecturer and researcher in European law at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands. His main research interests encompass European constitutional law, EU procedural law, judicial decision-making, and legal methodology, with a particular focus on the interaction between the Court of Justice of the EU and the national courts of the EU member states.

Jesse's research has been awarded with the New Voices Prize 2023-2025 by the European Journal of Legal Studies, and the Best Paper Prize at the Early-Career Researcher Workshop 2022 of the University of Edinburgh's Europa Institute. As a lecturer, he won the title for Lecturer of the Year 2023 at the Open Universiteit, after receiving this title in 2021 within the Faculty of Law.

Currently, Jesse is still finalising his PhD project, written at the Radboud University, which explores the use of the EU's preliminary ruling procedure by national courts. More specifically, it examines the motives of national courts (not) to refer preliminary questions to the Court of Justice of the EU. The project combines legal-doctrinal methods (i.e. systematic case law analysis of referred and potential but non-referred preliminary questions), with empirical methods (i.e. qualitative interviews with judges). Its core analysis compares the practices in four diverging fields of EU law (asylum, consumer, competition and criminal law) and three EU member States (the Netherlands, Germany and Austria).

Before joining the Open Universiteit, Jesse worked as a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Radboud University. He holds an LLM degree (cum laude) and LLB degree in International and European Law from this same university. In the course of his PhD, he was a visiting scholar at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. During his studies, Jesse completed internships at the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pleaded in the European Law Moot Court Competition, and followed courses at the University of Vienna.