
Virginia Passalacqua is an expert in EU law, migration law, and legal mobilization, which she investigates with a law in context perspective. She is interested in understanding how social movements and civil society actors use litigation at the EU level and, vice versa, how EU law impacts social justice, discrimination, and minorities’ rights.
Virginia holds a degree in law (cum laude) from the University of Bologna and a Ph.D. in EU law from the European University Institute, where she worked under the supervision of Professor Bruno de Witte. Her dissertation, Legal mobilization and the judicial construction of EU migration law, was awarded the Mauro Cappelletti Prize for the Best EUI Thesis in Comparative Law and her paper, “Altruism, Euro-Expertise and Open EU Legal Opportunity Structure: Empirical Insights on Legal Mobilization Before the CJEU in the Migration Field” was awarded the Ius Commune Prize 2020. Virginia’s work features in European and American journals such as Common Market Law Review, European Constitutional Law Review, and Law and Development Review.
Virginia is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE). Before she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto and at the University of Turin, and an Academic Fellow at Bocconi University. She held visiting positions at the London School of Economics and at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. She is part of the project “Equality Law in Europe: A New Generation” and she is one of the coordinators of the ADiM Young Researchers Lab, a network of young scholars working on migration.
As an Emile Noël Fellow, Virginia will work on her book on legal mobilization for migrant rights, where she sheds light on why civil society actors mobilize EU law in some countries but not in others