Yvonne Erkens is Associate Professor at the Department of Labour Law. Her areas of expertise are international labour law, employment contract law, dismissal law, and procedural law.

After graduating from Leiden University, she combined practice and theory for a long time. For several years, she lectured at Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, worked as a lawyer in The Hague and Leiden and was employed by an employers’ association where her focus was on collective labour law. Since 2004, Yvonne Erkens has been working full time at Leiden University; initially in a combined appointment at the departments Moot Court and Labour Law, and since July 2010 full time for the Department of Labour Law. She obtained her doctorate in 2013 with research on labour law adjudication.

Yvonne Erkens has been a deputy cantonal judge since March 2011, first at the District Court of Limburg and from 2018 at the District Court of Noord-Holland. She has been a member of Leiden University’s Committee on Scientific Integrity since December 2012. From 2018, she has held the position of (co)chair of the Committee on Scientific Integrity of Leiden University and the LUMC.

For a number of years, Yvonne Erkens’ research has focused on international labour law, more specifically on the enforcement of fundamental labour rights (prohibition of forced labour, child labour, discrimination, and freedom of association) in global supply chains. Together with Paul van der Heijden, she established the Database of Business Ethics (DBBE), a collection of Codes of Conduct of listed companies from over the whole world, available at https://www.db-business-ethics.org.

With research conducted using the DBBE, she is participating in the research project Empirical Legal Studies (ELS), one of the two legal science themes of the Dutch national sector plan for law.

Yvonne Erkens is Editor-in-Chief of the International Labor Rights Case Law Journal (ILaRC). ILaRC contains decisions and commentaries in the area of fundamental labour rights, produced in regional and international dispute settlement mechanisms. These include the ILO,  National Contact Points (NCPs) acting under the OECD Guidelines, the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human rights, and many others.

In the spring of 2022, Yvonne Erkens was appointed Global Law Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven.

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