Since January 2023, Tom has been a postdoc at the Institute for Private Law of Leiden University. In 2015, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and cum laude his bachelor’s degree in law at Utrecht University. In 2017, he completed the Legal Research Master programme cum laude, also at Utrecht University. In 2019, he won the G.J. Wiarda L.R.M. Price for his master’s thesis about norm-setting in the law of obligations and the fact-value gap.
From November 2017 until August 2018, Tom was a junior lecturer at the Molengraaff Institute for Private Law of Utrecht University. In September 2018, he started working as a PhD candidate at the Utrecht Centre for Accountability and Liability Law. In April 2023, he successfully defended his PhD thesis, which dealt with the question of whether nudges – behavioural interventions that do not restrict freedom of choice – can improve the protection of weaker parties within Dutch contract law.
Tom’s main research interests are (European) consumer law, contract theory, legal theory, and the application of behavioural insights in private law. Within the Consumer ID project, he has been working on the project about contextualised consumer law. Next to his research, he teaches courses about the law of obligations in the bachelor and master programmes of Leiden Law School.
It is superfluous to say that not all consumers are the same. Different consumers not only want different things but also have different personalities, vulnerabilities, and skills. Should European consumer law therefore become more differentiated?
On 25 April 2024, Advocate General Emiliou delivered his long-awaited opinion on the question of whether the average consumer should be seen as a homo economicus or as an individual with bounded rationality.
On 14 November 2024, the Court of Justice issued the long-awaited judgment in case C‑646/22, Compass Banca. Consumer ID postdoctoral researchers, Agnieszka Jabłonowska and Tom Bouwman, share their first thoughts on the ruling.
