Dr. Jacob Giltaij (1981) is a Dutch legal historian currently working for the University of Helsinki in Finland. Having earned a Masters in International, European and Comparative law, he composed a dissertation on the complicated problem of the existence of human rights in Roman law. For the resulting work, he received his PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 2011. On the topic of human rights in Roman law, he has subsequently published various articles in international journals and collections, including a book contribution for Cambridge University Press on revisiting the origins of human rights. Other key publications are pieces for the Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, the Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Law series, and History of Political Thought.

Since 2013 he has been working on a European Research Council project on the topic of the "Reinvention of European legal culture 1934-1964" (foundlaw.org), hosted by the University of Helsinki. The project concerns various professors of Roman law examining the idea of a European legal culture before, during, and after the Second World War. In this project, he focuses on the life and works of Fritz Schulz (1879-1957), a Jewish scholar of Roman law who was ousted from office by the Nazi regime and forced to flee to the UK when the War broke out.

The objective of his stay at NYU will be to collect, analyze, and present archival sources pertaining to Schulz and other refugee scholars in the Anglo-American academic world from 1934 to 1964.