Roeland Duco Kollewijn was born in Amsterdam, on december 7, 1892, a son of Dr. Roeland Anthony Kollewijn, the well known protagonist of a simplified orthography of the Dutch language.

I do not know what his parents initially had in mind for his future. As a matter of fact they made him follow a type of secondary school, which did not—and still does not—qualify its pupils for the academic study of the humanities, the very study of which his father was a destinguished representative. It is said that young Kollewijn at that time saw himself as a future architect but that his father denied him the indispensable vein of fantasy for that calling. Be this as it may, immediately after finishing the secondary school in 1910, Roeland Duco started preparing for a supplementary examination (Staatsexamen) which, in 1912, opened to him the gates to the arts departments of the University of his native city. Here he chose for the study of law under the guidance of such eminent scholars as A. A. H. Struycken, I. Henri Hijmans and above all Paul Scholten, the man who together with E. M. Meyers (of Leyden University) dominated Dutch legal science for a lifetime.