As an Associate Professor of Legal Sociology, Jeff Handmaker teaches law, human rights, development and social justice and leads a research project on Legal Mobilization at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, which forms part of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

In the Leiden MSc Programme in Law and Society, Jeff teaches the Elective Course on “Mobilizing Rights and Social Justice”.

As a socio-legal scholar, his research explores the social and political dimensions of mobilizing law in relation to a variety of contexts and themes. Jeff has a long-time association with South Africa and Southern Africa and is a research fellow in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and an Editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights.