Cuyvers, Armin

Armin Cuvyers is Professor of European Law at Leiden University, where he holds the chair in EU Constitutional Law and Comparative Regional Integration. He is also the director of CompaRe, the Leiden Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Comparative Regional Integration and head of the department of EU law at Leiden Law School. He previously was a visiting researcher at a.o. Berkeley, Stanford, Sydney University, Hastings Law School and Bilgi, as well as a visiting fellow at the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) the in-house think tank of the European Commission President.

Armin Cuyvers studies in Leiden. Harvard and Oxford and obtained his PhD in Leiden, jointly in European law and in Legal Philosophy with his thesis: ‘The EU as a Confederal Union of Sovereign Member Peoples’. This thesis, in a comparative perspective with the US, explores a confederal structure for the EU. As of 2011, Cuyvers was respectively an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of EU Law at Leiden Law School.

In his research on EU constitutional law and comparative regional integration Cuyvers combines traditional legal-constitutional methods with two innovative approaches. Firstly, he compares the EU with other regional organisations such as ASEAN, MERCOSUR, CARICOM and the EAC. Contrary to the standard approach, he thereby also looks at what the EU can learn from other organisations, instead of assuming the EU is the gold standard. Secondly, he collaborates with social psychologists to integrate empirical insights into EU constitutional law. Within UNU-CRIS, Armin focusses on the legal dimension of regional integration, trying to find the leanest and most effective legal form for regional collaboration that fits the policy objectives and political reality on the ground.