en/nl
Office (new address as of 1 November 2011)
Raadhuisstraat 22-2
1016 DE Amsterdam
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Public transit: bus or tram to Dam Square
Driving directions: not recommended, parking is expensive and limited

E  info@avocado-legal.nl
T  +31 020 71 73 975 (11am-1pm M-F)
F  +31 020 68 66 840

Please direct all postal correspondence to:
P.O. Box 14628
1001 LC Amsterdam
The Netherlands

about legal advisor Jeremy Bierbach

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (born 1975), Jeremy graduated from Georgetown University (Washington, DC) in 1996 with a bachelor's in linguistics, having also done a year of study in theoretical and Indo-European linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. After working as an IT professional at a number of companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, including Apple, Genentech, and Green Witch Internet Radio, Jeremy emigrated to the Netherlands in 2001 to continue his career. It was there that he was first confronted with the IND, being made to wait 9 months for a residence permit as a highly-qualified professional — as it turned out, due to a bureaucratic error. In 2003, Jeremy changed his career direction and began studying law at the University of Amsterdam, receiving his LL.B (bachelor's, roughly equivalent to a J.D.) in Dutch law in 2006 and his LL.M (master's) in constitutional and administrative law in 2007. His master's thesis dealt with the constitutional history of compulsory identification legislation in the Netherlands.

Jeremy continues to be active in academia: he is researching a PhD in European constitutional law at the University of Amsterdam (comparing the development of EU citizenship to the history of US citizenship), and is assistant editor of the European Constitutional Law Review.

Jeremy worked for two and a half years as a volunteer at the Rechtswinkel Migranten (free immigration law clinic) in Amsterdam. For one and a half years, he was employed as a legal specialist and linguist at De Taalstudio, working on establishing fair standards in the use of language analysis to determine the national origin of asylum seekers; he is still a consultant to De Taalstudio.

Jeremy is a member of the WRV (Workgroup for Legal Aid to Immigrants), a professional association of Dutch legal aid providers in immigration law, as well as of the Netzwerk-Migrationsrecht, a network of young European researchers on immigration law.

Jeremy is fluent in English, Dutch and German.