Nina Holvast is an interdisciplinairy researcher, who uses multi-method research methods to study the Law in Action. Her research focusses on courts, judicial decision-making and the legal profession. Holvast has an educational background in law and social science: she obtained an LLM in Criminal Law (cum laude) and a MSc in Criminology (cum laude) at Leiden University. She completed her doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation (Eleven International Publishers) explored the role of judicial assistants in judicial decision-making. Prior to her PhD she worked at the Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Justice and Security and was a part-time law clerk at the District Court in The Hague. Her current research concentrates on the functioning of the judicial institutions, the effect of extra-legal factors in judicial decision-making and legal socialisation in law school. Holvast is regularly asked as an expert in empirical legal research methods during seminars and in supervisory committees.

Holvast has been an editor of Recht der Werkelijkheid (the journal of Dutch-Flemish Law and Society Association) and is currently a member of the editorial board of Erasmus Law Review. She was an academic visitor at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University and the Judicial Institute of University College London.