Marija is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School the Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law and a managing editor of European Law Open. She teaches several courses, including 'Private law in European and International Perspective' and 'Law as a Change-Maker'. Marija has acquired her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, with a thesis Legitimacy and European Private Law.

Marija has held appointments as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Hamburg. She was also a Teaching Fellow at the VMU in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Research

Marija is currently working on two research projects. Her ERC funded project ‘Law as a vehicle for social change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices (N-EXTLAW)’ adopts a broad perspective on private law as a vehicle of social change, exploring the ways in which rethinking (private) law's role in facilitating and mainstreaming 'non-extractive economic practices' may open up possibilities for a wider socio-ecological transformation.

N-EXTLAW draws and builds on the ideas stemming from Marija’s forthcoming open access book 'Reimagining Prosperity: Towards a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU’ (CUP). In the book project, Marija asks how can we interpret the transformation that the EU is currently undergoing, under the influence of several ongoing crises. She argues that the EU has hesitantly embarked on a (reversable) path towards ‘shared prosperity’, where collective action and solidarity – rather than ‘markets’ and private gain – can be seen as the main drivers of progress and prosperity. Yet this attempt to deliver shared prosperity is a race against the clock: is the EU doing enough to deliver shared prosperity before nativist forces become dominant in Europe?