For quite some years now, crimes of ‘the powerful’ have been studied by criminologists. While researching crimes of ‘the powerful’, researchers aim to maintain and safeguard their integrity and ethics. However, there seems to be a friction between, on the one hand, ethics of the researchers themselves and on the other hand, ethics (policies) of universities. Obviously, not only do they have to justify their actions and decisions to themselves and ‘science’ as a whole, they must justify their research to ethics committees (EC’s) of universities. It could result in complex and difficult situations when researchers suspect that EC’s themselves may be instruments and products of the powerful groups they are studying. In that case, EC’s might undermine ethics and research integrity themselves. What do certain EC- ‘conditions’ look like for research ethics and to which extent do they have to be adjusted or reconsidered when criminologists are researching ‘the powerful’? The key question that will be answered in this contribution is as follows: how can criminologist (re)act ethically responsibly when confronted with (un)ethical committees? To answer this and other relevant questions, after reviewing literature, we reflect on a biographical study of a legal arms trader. We then elaborate on the ‘ethics creep’ (Haggerty, 2004) that seems to haunt social sciences nowadays.

This article merely outlines the methods of Teylingereind with respect to youth and young adult suspects who are difficult to examine, based on five cases. By collecting and combining data about this group from a range of different perspectives, better insight about the specific person was obtained in each of the cases as described. When it is possible to describe specific behavioural patterns, statements could be made about freedom of behavioural choices, danger of recidivism, and advice about the most appropriate legal framework. In this way, when there are serious concerns about the developmental course of youth and young adults who are not willing to cooperate in diagnostic research pro Justitia, clinical observation is of added value to the judge.

In Dutch courts several pilots are being carried out in order to enhance the quality of civil procedure. The main focus of the pilots is to speed up the procedure and make it more cost-effective, while ensuring the procedure is easily accessible and is overseen by a mediating judge in a nearby court. This focus largely corresponds with aspects of the civil procedure that the courts and the minister of Justice have identified as in need of attention. The courts and the minister have focused on different specific problems and propose different solutions, however, and neither aims to address the quality of civil procedure as a whole. It is doubtful whether the proposals for improvement, put forward by the courts and the minister, can address the concerns they have intended to resolve and whether the overall quality of the civil procedure (for all civil cases instead of the simple ones) will be improved. Solutions to the problems of the civil procedure cannot be devised without first developing a clear picture of the problems people experience with civil procedures and the courts.

The tremendously popular television programme De Rijdende Rechter (The Itinerant Judge) has an uncomfortable relationship with official legal practice. Many people indeed think that the itinerant judge who arrives in their street to personally check neighbourly grievances has come as a representative of the Law with a capital L. It is not clear where reality TV stops and current legal practice begins. Things have become more complicated because the itinerant judge has become a symbol of the ‘close-to-the-people’ judge that is embraced by legal practice today. In this article the murky boundary between TV judges and official judiciary is investigated, taking into account the cult status of the itinerant judge, the effect of imagination on reality, similar phenomena in the United States and the current situation in the Netherlands.

Three cases of sexual violence with two teenagers and one young woman as dead victims have put – besides the indescribable sufferings of themselves, their families, friends and acquaintances – a heavy burden on Dutch collective memories of the year 2017. Dutch society commiserated on a massive scale: volunteers helped searching, thousands united in silent marches and more than 400 thousand citizens signed an online petition that emotionally called for a firm revision of the ‘failing justice system’. In this article we explore the deeper social, personal and cultural elements that gave media messages their strong emotional impact in Dutch society.

The aim of this article is to search for a more focused approach of fighting back against ‘the fear of crime’. It is based on a study of the backgrounds of risen levels of fear of crime in twelve neighborhoods in the regions of Utrecht and Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Eight central themes could be identified in the stories of 240 respondents: specific locations, avoidance behavior, social stability, social quality, superdiversity, negative neighborhood images, burglary, and societal pessimism. Despite the fact that these central themes appeared in the overall analysis, every neighborhood showed another mix of factors explaining risen levels of fear of crime. This means that policies to reduce ‘the fear of crime’ should focus on specific, local explanations and should always be tailor-made.

There is no such thing as the feeling of unsafety. The trend in feelings of unsafety is measured using a standard question that has figured in the successive Safety Monitors (Veiligheidsmonitors) for many years: ‘Do you occasionally feel unsafe?’ This general question formulation elicits information on how uneasy the Dutch feel about safety. The nature and burden of this unease may vary greatly among them. The authors’ analysis shows that crime-specific measures of fear of victimization differ fundamentally from both cognitive assessments (risk perception) and general measures of feelings of unsafety. Hence, people who occasionally feel unsafe do not automatically think or fear that they will fall victim to crime and vice versa. Consequently, the authors identify four main constellations of subjective safety which emerge in different population groups, some more burdened by fear of victimization than others. The authors argue that policy should at least seek to reduce the most serious problems. They propose personal fear of victimization as an alternative for general feelings of safety.

The post-colonial re-evaluation of prominent figures in Dutch history has been resisted fiercely in the public sphere. This article raises the question how lives from the colonial era that are a source of national pride, but are also tainted by their implication in the history of slavery, colonialism and racism can be presented in a way that does justice to their historical context. Jacobus Capitein, who was first enslaved and later became an advocate for slavery in the 1740s, was initially regarded a hero in the eighteenth century, but has received a far more critical evaluation since the second half of the twentieth century. This article takes the way in which professional historians and heritage institutions have dealt with the complex and layered life story of Jacobus Capitein as a model for approaching the lives of the canonical figures of Dutch Atlantic history.

De uitspraak over de aansprakelijkheid van bestuurders en intern toezichthouders bij Stichting ROC Leiden noopt tot doordenking van het externe toezicht in het onderwijs, de betekenis van dat externe toezicht op het functioneren van bestuurders en intern toezichthouders, de omgang met het instrument van bestuurdersaansprakelijkheid en meer maatschappelijke nuance.

Unlike criminal career research into the criminal behavior of natural persons, longitudinal research into rule violations by corporations is still scant. The few available studies are mostly limited to US corporations, and suffer from either a small sample size or a short follow-up period, limiting the generalizability of their findings. The present study uses longitudinal data on rule violating behavior of 494 Dutch chemical corporations derived from yearly inspections (N=4.367) of the relevant safety and environmental agencies between 2006 and 2017. The study aims to gain insight in the patterning of rule violations by Dutch chemical corporations, and the extent to which these patterns are associated with sector and corporate characteristics. The results show that rule violation is common among Dutch chemical corporations. A small minority of chronically violating corporations however, is responsible for a disproportional share of all observed rule violations. Using group-based trajectory modelling (GBTM) we distinguish several longitudinal patterns of rule violations in our data. Available sector and corporation characteristics are only weakly associated with the patterns of rule violations identified.

John Griffiths’ social working approach of legislation tries to estimate the direct effects of laws which prescribe certain behavior. The basic idea of the approach is that rule-guided behavior (direct effect) is influenced by the different groups citizens belong to. Griffiths refers to these groups using the concept coined by Sally Moore (1971) ‘semi-autonomous social fields’. Although Griffiths never formulated hypotheses regarding the relation between SASFs and direct effects, the article explores two of them: If the relevant SASFs accept the new norm, direct effects will occur; and if the relevant SASFs are not ‘though’ (and don’t accept the new norm) direct effects will occur. These two hypotheses are related to the results of smoking bans in bars in the Netherlands. The acceptance of the smoking bans in bars is low. The thoughness of the SASFs in bars and their organization differ in time and so did the compliance with the smoking bans. Because this article is not based on research that depart from the hypotheses, further research based on the hypotheses is needed to draw firm conclusions. The article is rounded up with a plea to use Griffiths approach in impact assessments of legislation.

Met zijn Proeve van een verbeterde Grondwet geeft Huub Linthorst oplossingen voor de risico’s die uit zijn ‘stresstest’ naar voren kwamen. Tot de voorstellen behoren de afschaffing van de Eerste Kamer, de invoering van het toetsingsrecht, versterking van (de formulering van) de grondrechten, een lichtere herzieningsprocedure en de invoering van een bindend referendum. Aan de doelstelling van haalbaarheid heeft Linthorst voldaan door op belangrijke punten tegemoet te komen aan voor- en tegenstanders. Naast verbetering en haalbaarheid, is het doel van deze Proeve het bereiken van meer democratie en van effectievere waarborgen tegen aantasting van onze rechtstaat. Of deze Proeve, na het bereiken van het Staatsblad meer democratie brengt en bovendien een dam kan opwerpen tegen schendingen van de rechtsstaat zoals die in Polen en Hongrijke, is allerminst gegarandeerd. Afgezien van het gebruikelijke cynisme over de normatieve kracht van de Grondwet, beslaat onze geschreven constitutie steeds minder de constitutionele werkelijkheid.

In Europa wordt discussie gevoerd over de wenselijkheid van het uitvoeren van marktanalyses om te bepalen welke luchthavens in aanmerking komen voor economische regulering. Daarmee kan het regelgevend kader voor luchthavens meer vergelijkbaar worden met bijvoorbeeld dat van de telecommunicatiesector. In dit artikel wordt ingegaan op het huidige juridische kader voor de economische regulering van luchthavens en de discussie die daarover wordt gevoerd voor wat betreft marktanalyses. Voorts wordt ingegaan op een aantal praktische vraagstukken bij bij het invoeren van marktanalyses. Daarbij wordt de mogelijkheid besproken in de regelgeving sturing te geven aan de bewijsvoering rond de afbakening van geografische markten.

Bij aansprakelijkheid en onzekere risico’s draait het om de verdeling van wetenschappelijke onzekerheden. In dit artikel wordt besproken dat vanuit een correctief paradigma men focust op de verdeling van onzekerheden tussen de procespartijen, terwijl het reguleringsparadigma de nadruk legt op de verdeling van onzekerheden over de maatschappij. Toepassing van beide paradigma’s leidt tot verschillende uitkomsten, onder meer in het kader van de onrechtmatigheid en het CSQN-verband.