Leyden University
NautaDutilh
District Court
Christiaan Baardman was born in 1958. His professional life took place in the Netherlands, where he studied at Leyden University and later worked as a lawyer and judge.
His later judicial career centred on The Hague, where the Court of Appeal (gerechtshof) hears appeals in civil, criminal, and tax cases. The court's criminal work formed the setting in which he came to specialise in computer crime.
Baardman studied at Leyden University, the English name for what is now Leiden University, and completed his studies there in 1983. Leiden was founded in 1575 by William I of Orange and is the oldest university in the Netherlands. It was established as a Protestant institution to educate the citizens of the northern Netherlands and to supply the government with educated men.
He was admitted to the bar in the Netherlands in 1985, the step that qualified him to practise as a lawyer. His subsequent career combined legal practice with judicial appointments in the Dutch court system.
His career includes a partnership at Resident Associates. He later worked as a lawyer at NautaDutilh, a firm whose history dates back to 1724 and which practises Dutch, Belgian, and Luxembourg law. There he concentrated on liability and insurance law.
After NautaDutilh he worked as a judge at the district court (rechtbank), where he gained experience in the civil sector. In 2006 he moved to the Court of Appeal in The Hague (Gerechtshof Den Haag), where he has since been mostly engaged in criminal matters, with an emphasis on cybercrime. He is a senior judge (senior raadsheer) there and chairs the Cyber Chamber (Cyberkamer), which handles appeals in criminal cases involving computer crime.
In 2009 each Dutch court of appeal received a knowledge centre to strengthen its profile, and the Court of Appeal in The Hague established the Kenniscentrum Cybercrime. Baardman was one of the centre's founders with two colleagues. He first worked there as a researcher two days a week alongside his regular criminal-law duties, and he later became its coordinator. The centre provides judges and court staff across the Netherlands with legal and practical knowledge on cybercrime, through a website, a quarterly newsletter, a helpdesk, and courses developed with SSR, the training institute of the Dutch judiciary.
Baardman's documented membership dates from his admission to the bar in the Netherlands in 1985. The Netherlands Bar Association (Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten) is the professional body of advocates admitted to practise law in the Netherlands.
