Wouter Snijders

Wouter Snijders (26 May 1928 – 21 July 2020) was a Dutch judge and legal scholar. He was justice on the Supreme Court of the Netherlands between 1970 and 1986 and served as vice president from 1986 to 1998. Snijders also served as chair of the Court's civil chamber. He was the government's commissioner for the introduction of the new Burgerlijk Wetboek between 1971 and 1995. Snijders is credited as being one of the most influential civil law scholars of the Netherlands.

Career Snijders was born on 26 May 1928 in Hilversum. He started studying medicine, but did not like having to wake up early for classes. He subsequently contemplated studying history, but his previous education did not give him the needed qualifications and he thus decided to study law. Snijders remained an uninterested student, only being inspired by professor . He graduated with a law degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1953. During his studies he performed his military service for 1.5 years in the Dutch East Indies. Snijders became a lawyer and later a judge in Rotterdam. From this latter position he was detached to the Ministry of Justice in 1965, to start working on a new civil code of the Netherlands.

On 17 July 1970 he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, but only took up the work associated with the position in September 1976, due to his work on the new civil code. In the 1980s he became chair of the civil chamber of the Supreme Court. In 1995, three years after the introduction of the new Burgerlijk Wetboek, Snijders laid down his position as government's commissioner. During the 1990s he helped Russian colleagues with the rewriting of the Civil Code of Russia.

Snijders was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. He received an honorary doctorate from Leiden University in 1980.