Many doctrinal legal research questions require making use of other academic disciplines or perspectives. This article explains the relevance of legal philosophy for doctrinal research projects. Often legal research questions have conceptual or evaluative dimensions that presuppose philosophical understanding. For research on the concept of democracy, the function of constitutional rights, or the possible introduction of a referendum in the Netherlands, questions of a philosophical nature need to be answered. Legal philosophy can supplement and enrich doctrinal research in various ways. In this article, we present seven purposes that legal philosophy may serve in the context of a doctrinal research project: conceptual clarification, exposition and reconstruction of fundamental normative principles and values, theory building, providing creative perspectives, structural critiques, evaluation, and recommendations. For each objective, we illustrate how to use relevant philosophical methods. Thus, this article complements our earlier publication ‘Legal Philosophy as an Enrichment of Doctrinal Research – Part I: Introducing Three Philosophical Methods’.¹x http://www.lawandmethod.nl/tijdschrift/lawandmethod/2020/01/lawandmethod-D-19-00006.

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• * This text has been presented to classes at the University of Zagreb, Queen Mary University of London and Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam; we profited from the feedback of our students. We also want to thank Irma Bluijs, Machteld Geuskens, Tamar de Waal and the reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article, and Jacqueline Brand and Robert Poll for providing research assistance.

• 1 http://www.lawandmethod.nl/tijdschrift/lawandmethod/2020/01/lawandmethod-D-19-00006.

This article takes issue with the tendency among political scientists and cultural critics to reduce the current rise of populism to resentment among certain groups in society. Instead, the article argues that particularly right-wing populist cultural criticism is derived from the Christian conceptual foundations of Western culture. Typical for these foundations has been the process of ‘diversification’ as defined by the American political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). As such, ‘diversification’ is diametrically opposed to the so-called ‘immanentization of the eschaton’ characteristic of modern Gnosticism. Populism is to be understood as a counter-movement to this Gnostic tendency in politics.

This contribution explores the meaning and scope of solidarity with the emergence of the coronavirus discourse as formulated by politicians in order to make sense of the virus. It offers a poststructuralist account drawing on discourse theory together with insights from Levinas and Derrida. This leads to a critical reflection on the prevailing view of solidarity as secondary and derivative to corona policies, because solidarity is often subjugated to hegemonic meanings of efficiency. Instead, the argument is made that solidarity refers to the unique responsibility to which the other as wholly other commands me. This appeal for responsibility, that is presented in the face of the other, is to be assumed in the distance between the rules and the singularity of the situation. Accordingly, solidarity is described as a paradox of dependence (calculability) and independence (beyond calculation), that appears in a moment of undecidability, for it can never be overcome.

What is at stake in invoking solidarity in legal-political contexts? The guiding hypothesis of this article is that solidarity is always and necessarily linked to the concept of community. A plea for solidarity will, in other words, directly lead one to the question: solidarity with whom? On the one hand, solidarity may be understood as extending only to those who belong to the same community as us. In this reading, solidarity builds upon an already existing community and applies to members only. On the other hand, invoked by those who aim to question the status quo, solidarity also plays a key role in practices of contestation. In these contexts, it focuses on collective action and the reimagination of political community. The article ends by articulating how this second interpretation of solidarity might prove helpful in making sense of our current predicament of a global pandemic.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most governments in Europe have imposed disciplinary and controlling mechanisms on their populations. In the name of solidarity, citizens are pressed to submit to lockdowns, social distancing or corona apps. Building on the historical-philosophical studies of Michel Foucault, this article shows that these mechanisms are spin-offs of health regimes that have evolved since the seventeenth century. In case of COVID-19, these regimes decreased the infection, morbidity and mortality rates. But, as a side-effect, they limited the opportunities to act together and practice solidarity. This negatively affected the social cohesion and public sphere in already highly individualistic societies. To prevent the further disappearing of solidarity – understood as something that is enacted rather than as a moral value or political principle – governments and citizens need to invest in the restoral of the social conditions that enable and facilitate the practicing of solidarity after the epidemic.

The COVID-19 crisis has produced or amplified disruptive processes in societies. This article wants to argue for the fact that we understand the meaning of the COVID-19 crisis only if we relate it to the fundamental vulnerability of modern life and the awareness of vulnerability of whole societies. Vulnerability in modernity are expressions of a reality of freedom that is to some extent considered contingent and therefore unsecured. It is true that law is understood today as the protective power of freedom. The thesis of the article, however, boils down to the fact that the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in a new way of thinking about the protection of freedom. This also means that the principle of solidarity must be assigned a new social role. Individual and societal vulnerability refer thereafter to an interconnectedness, dependency, and a future perspective of freedom margins that, in addition to the moral one, can also indicate a need for legal protection. In this respect, law has not only a function of delimitation, but also one of inclusion.

One can only welcome the re-edition of Herman Franke’s impressive Ph.D. thesis on the history of the prison system in the Netherlands. Although a short English-language version of this book has been published, one still has to look out for a comparative assessment between his analysis and histories on the prison system in other Western countries. This contribution to the special issue of Justitiële verkenningen (Judicial explorations) does not make up an attempt to fabricate such an assessment. It only relates to the ways Franke has dealt with, on the one hand, international authors such as Cesare Beccaria, Edouard Ducpétiaux and Cesare Lombroso, who have played an important role in the development of the Western prison system. And it looks into Franke’s dealing with, on the other hand, international authors such as Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, and Michel Foucault, whose interpretations of its development to a large extent still dominate the academic debate with regard to the history of the prison system. The conclusion is that Franke’s analysis of the first category of authors really is rather superficial and his analysis of the second category is a much more balanced one.

In 1990, criminologist Herman Franke published a seminal book on 200 years detention in the Netherlands. For the occasion of the reissue of this book in 2020, the question is posed to what extent Franke’s vision of a gradual ‘emancipation’ of prisoners, in the realm of a societal ‘civilization process’, as it is put forward by Norbert Elias, still holds today. The author confronts the civilization perspective with the three main competing paradigms in penology, derived from the work of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Michel Foucault. After describing some recent developments in penal practices, he concludes that despite the fact that sanctioning is increasingly taking place within society, which can well be analyzed from an eliasian perspective, there is little reason to still adhere to the progress optimism, implicit in Franke’s book, and that today we rather witness an emancipation of the ‘angry citizen’, in which vulnerable groups in society, such as prisoners, are despised rather than ‘emancipated’.

In 1990 Herman Franke’s masterly dissertation Twee eeuwen gevangen. Misdaad en straf in Nederland was published. An abbreviated version appeared in English in 1995: The emancipation of prisoners: A socio-historical analysis of the Dutch prison experience, awarded best foreign study by the American Society of Criminology. Franke analyzes the developments in the Dutch prison system from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Despite the size of almost a thousand pages, the book reads like a novel. Even before Herman Franke’s untimely death in 2010 there were plans for a re-publication of the book in a hardcover. That re-edition was finally made available by Boom criminologie in 2020. In this special issue of Justitiële verkenningen, eight prison experts from science and practice reflect on the contemporary prison system from the perspective of the book. It offers tools to rise above the delusions of the day in public and scientific discussions about punishment and to relate new developments to the theoretical concepts introduced by Franke.

This article reflects on the brilliant 1990-book of criminologist Herman Franke on long-term developments in the Dutch prison system from 1800 onward. A pertinent question is whether it is possible and adequate to use the discourse of ‘emancipation’ to catch the historical processes in total institutions. A comparison is made with parallel transformations in the institutional sector of mental health, a social field in which there has been a radical movement claiming better legal protection and more humane living conditions. Surely an improvement has occurred in the actual situation of prisoners and mental patients, but one has to be reluctant (or even sceptical) to frame this in terms of ‘emancipation’.

In dit artikel geeft de auteur haar visie op het onderwijs in beroepsethiek aan rechtenstudenten. Ze bespreekt de inhoud van de juridische beroepsethiek en enkele didactische aspecten. De auteur maakt onderscheid tussen rechtvaardigende perspectieven, die een explicatie en rechtvaardiging van een onderscheidende juridische beroepsethiek en -moraal mogelijk maken, en kritische perspectieven, die een kritische beoordeling van die rechtvaardigende verhalen mogelijk maken. Ze benadrukt daarbij het belang van empirische, in het bijzonder sociaal- en moraalpsychologische benaderingen in het onderwijs van beroepsethiek. Ze wijst op het feit dat studenten niet beschikken over relevante praktijkervaring en dat dit een obstakel vormt voor diepgaande casusanalyses. In de conclusie betoogt de auteur dat de belangstelling en de ruimte voor het onderwijs in beroepsethiek aan rechtenstudenten sinds het nieuwe millennium wel is toegenomen, maar dat meer systematische reflectie op deze vakken nodig is. Ook stelt ze dat bij het onderwijs in beroepsethiek aan rechtenstudenten die nog geen werkervaring hebben in een specifieke beroepspraktijk, de nadruk zou moeten liggen op thema’s die in de beroepsopleiding minder aandacht krijgen. Het accent moet meer liggen op het verwerven van ethische en empirische theoretische kennis en kritische reflectie op rechtvaardigende verhalen, en minder op discussie over concrete gevallen. Haar laatste aanbeveling is dat in het onderwijs niet alleen normatief-ethische theorieën aan de orde moeten komen, maar ook empirische inzichten over bounded ethicality.

The article deals with the possibility of socializing law students through space. It first indicates which features of space affect the possibility of influencing interactions and identity. It then discusses how we can use symbolic interactionism to study interactions and socialization in spaces of law faculties. Then, on the basis of the interviews conducted with law faculty students about their space perception, it shows how to research student socialization through space and how far-reaching its effects can be.

De auteur betoogt dat met de doelstellingen achter het informatiemanipulatieverbod van de Marktmisbruikverordening wordt beoogd het vertrouwen van het algemeen publiek, in tegenstelling tot slechts het vertrouwen van het beleggend publiek, te waarborgen. Een helder begrip van deze doelstellingen is noodzakelijk voor de effectieve handhaving van het informatiemanipulatieverbod.

Convict criminology draws from personal experience of imprisonment to offer critical criminological perspectives on punishment and prisons. In this article I discuss how some of these are aligned with questions of narrative and post-colonial perspectives in criminology. I use autoethnographic vignettes to communicate the experiences of imprisonment that inform the development of convict criminology, and I explore their relationship to narrative criminology’s interest in personal stories.

Critical narrative criminologists analyse dominant and institutionalised stories that can contribute to harm but they might also become more involved in interrogating and changing such narratives. The following question would be: in what ways can this be done? Based on experiences from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project on stigma with people who use(d) illegal drugs, this paper reflects on the epistemological opportunities and challenges of fusing narrative criminology with PAR. Although such an integration raises potential tensions – especially with regard to the role of the researcher – PAR can amplify narrative criminology by offering a framework for practicing critical, ethical and socially engaged scholarship. Vice versa, narrative criminology can deepen PAR in its analysis of discursive power structures and the relation between narratives and action.