Former Research Fellow Receives Prestigious Prize for PhD thesis
On 5 December 2022, former Research Fellow Janek T. Nowak was awarded at an official ceremony the prestigious Fernand Collin Law Prize for his doctoral thesis on “Ex officio application of EU law by Belgian civil courts” (original title: “Ambtshalve toepassing van EU-recht door de Belgische burgerlijke rechter”), which he prepared in the Department of European and Comparative Procedural Law at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg, led by Prof. Burkhard Hess, and defended at KU Leuven on 19 February 2021.
Delivered on a biennial basis, the Fernand Collin Prize is the most important award for a work written in Dutch on any legal subject at a Belgian university. It was established in honour of Fernand Collin, Professor at KU Leuven, and is organised by the University Foundation. Previous recipients include Profs. Piet Taelman and Koen Lenarts.
In his thesis, Janek investigates to which extent national procedural law of the Member States is capable of facilitating the application of EU law by analysing national case law and legislation in the context of private enforcement of EU competition law and EU consumer protection law. The results obtained in the Member States under investigation contribute to the ongoing debate on the harmonisation of national procedural law in the European Union, shed further light on the application of EU law by national courts in the areas of substantive law under investigation, and evaluate the current research agenda of EU law scholarship, in particular in the area of national procedural autonomy. The thesis will be published by Intersentia in 2023.
