Sabine Mair is Assistant Professor of European Union Law at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG). Her research focuses on the socio-political and economic dimensions of EU law, combining doctrinal analysis with interdisciplinary insights from the social sciences and humanities.

Sabine has recently been awarded a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for her project The EU Budgetary Galaxy. Law, Governance, and the Redistributive Transformation of Europe. The project analyses how EU public finance law structures the Union’s growing redistributive role and evaluates its constitutional significance. Through this analysis, it examines a fundamental question for any political community – who deserves what, why, and how – while developing normative guidance for Europe’s evolving system of public finance.

This project forms part of Sabine’s broader research agenda on how EU law shapes patterns of distribution and, more fundamentally, the kind of community that European integration creates. In 2023, she received a grant from the UvA Law School’s Research Strategic Investment Fund for a project on distributive justice in EU energy and agricultural law. She has also contributed to an international research network organized by the MPIL and the EUI on the role of law in constructing a European society and participated in the Horizon Europe RED-SPINEL project on EU law, democracy, and political polarisation. Before joining ACELG, Sabine was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at iCourts at the University of Copenhagen, where she explored the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union through a cultural lens.

Sabine is a trained lawyer and political scientist. She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute, an LL.M. in European Law from the College of Europe in Bruges, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She has also been a visiting researcher at Princeton University. Prior to joining UvA Law School, she worked at the Court of Justice of the European Union as a référendaire.