Darinka Piqani is Assistant Professor of European Union Law at the Europa Institute of Leiden Law School, the Netherlands. She is also visiting professor at the Law Faculty of Université Catholique, Lille. Since 2021, she serves as member and vice chair of the Accreditation Board for Higher Education, Albania. She obtained her PhD title at the Department of Law of the European University Institute in Florence, her LLM in comparative constitutional law at Central European University, Budapest and her law degree at the University of Tirana.
Her research focuses on the area of EU constitutional law, the relationship between national constitutional law and EU law, EU enlargement, EU internal market law. Her work has been published in edited volumes, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, The Oxford Encyclopedia of European Union Law, the European Constitutional Law Review, the Common Market Law Review, Nederlands Juristenbald etc.
She has been engaged as expert in various research and policy projects for the European Parliament, IOM (advising the Albanian government in the process of EU approximation); Balkans Policy Research Group; Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as academic coordinator for Leiden University in the Matra Rule of Law Training Programme II; Civil Rights Defenders, Albania. She has been a member of the research team in the project “The Challenge of Enforcing Rule of Law in International Organizations: Winning the Public and Resisting Populist Attacks”, supported by a seed grant of the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) Initiative of Leiden University; coordinator of an ICM Erasmus+ programme of exchange between Leiden University and University of Tirana; fellow researcher of READ programme funded the Albanian-American Development Foundation; lecturer on Chapter 23 at the Academy of European Integration and Negotiations, European Movement Albania.