Various of our academic board analysed employment law cases from last year. However, first, we start with some general remarks.

A worker was performing regular work tasks at their workplace when an attempted robbery took place. The worker suffered serious facial injuries as a result of an assault by one of the robbers and they filed a lawsuit against their employer claiming the latter was fully liable (both objectively and subjectively) for the work accident entitling them to reimbursement of all damages resulting from the accident.
The question that was raised was whether the employer can be held subjectively liable for an accident at work despite the fact that it had taken the necessary measures foreseen and/or imposed by law to prevent such accidents.

In deze bijdrage wordt onderzocht wat er vanuit een ‘herstelgericht’ perspectief te zeggen is over de afwikkeling van medische schade. Biedt restorative just culture aanknopingspunten voor een afwikkeling van medische schade die beter aansluit bij de behoeften van betrokkenen?

The purpose of this article is to investigate whether the notion of an interest should be taken more seriously than the notion of a right. It will be argued that it should; and not only because it can be just as amenable to the institutional taxonomical structure often said to be at the basis of rights thinking in law but also because the notion of an interest has a more epistemologically convincing explanatory power with respect to reasoning in law and its relation to social facts. The article equally aims to highlight some of the important existing work on the notion of an interest in law.

Onderzoek naar de wijze waarop letselschades worden afgewikkeld in Engeland, Noorwegen en Nederland brengt relevante verschillen in afwikkelingsculturen aan het licht. De Engelse wijze van afwikkeling is sterk gericht op afwikkeling in rechte en is vergaand vercommercialiseerd. De Noorse praktijk kenmerkt zich door een op sociale zekerheid gebaseerde afwikkelingscultuur buiten rechte, die in hoge mate is gebaseerd op onderling vertrouwen. De Nederlandse praktijk van schadeafwikkeling heeft met de Engelse gemeen dat zij vorm krijgt in een commerciële setting tegen de achtergrond van het civiele aansprakelijkheidsrecht. Met de Noorse praktijk heeft zij gemeen dat het proces van afwikkeling in hoge mate is gebaseerd op overleg buiten rechte en op onderling vertrouwen.

In 2012, China revised its Criminal Procedure Law (2012 CPL). One of the major changes is its official approval of the use of victim-offender reconciliation, or ‘criminal reconciliation’ in certain public prosecution cases. This change, on the one hand, echoes the Confucian doctrine that favours harmonious inter-personal relationships and mediation, while, on the other hand, it deviates from the direction of legal reforms dating from the 1970s through the late 1990s. Questions have emerged concerning not only the cause of this change in legal norms but also the proper position of criminal reconciliation in the current criminal justice system in China. The answers to these questions largely rely on understanding the role of traditional informal dispute resolution as well as its interaction with legal norms. Criminal reconciliation in ancient China functioned as a means to centralise imperial power by decentralizing decentralising its administration. Abolishing or enabling such a mechanism in law is merely a small part of the government’s strategy to react to political or social crises and to maintain social stability. However, its actual effect depends on the vitality of Confucianism, which in turn relies on the economic foundation and corresponding structure of society.

Sensitive interviews involve emotionally difficult topics which require participants to face issues that are deeply personal and possibly distressing. This paper draws together reflections concerning how researchers manage the challenges of conducting sensitive interviews, including the author’s own reflections concerning interviewing clinical negligence claimants. First, it examines the ethical guidelines that regulate sensitive research, and the challenges of obtaining informed consent and maintaining confidentiality. Ethical guidelines, however, provide limited assistance for ensuring the emotional care of research participants, and we also consider challenges that are not usually formally regulated. These include preparing for the interview, and then ensuring the emotional care of participants both during and after the interview itself. Sensitive research also raises deeper ethical issues concerning the negotiation of relations between researcher and participant, especially when this relationship is unequal. Finally, while previous research has generally focused on the need to take emotional care of research participants, less attention has been given to the emotional needs of researchers. It is argued that support systems for researchers are too often ad hoc, and that providing support is often not a priority of granting bodies, grant holders or supervisors, and that formal systems need to be put in place.

Legal novices are generally not very well educated in the do’s and don’ts of empirical legal research. This article lays out the general principles and discusses the most important stumbling blocks on the way forward. The presentation starts at the formulation of a research question. Next, the methodology of descriptive research (operationalization and measurement, sampling and selection bias) is briefly addressed. The main part of the article discusses the methodology of explanatory research (causal inference, experimental and quasi-experimental research designs, statistical significance, effect size). Medical malpractice law is used as a central source of illustration.

Met vergoeding van integriteitsschade wordt een vergoeding van immateriële schade toegekend wegens een inbreuk op het zelfbeschikkingsrecht. Hiermee verschuift het juridische obstakel van de causaliteit naar het schadebegrip. De vraag is of deze ‘schadepost’ daadwerkelijk juridisch relevante ‘schade’ is. De wetgever heeft zich hierover niet uitgelaten en de Hoge Raad heeft zich op dit punt nog niet uitgesproken. De wijze waarop het EHRM omgaat met het zelfbeschikkingsrecht kan inspiratie bieden voor de invulling van het Nederlandse concept ‘integriteitsschade’. In deze bijdrage wordt daarom niet alleen stilgestaan bij de discussie in Nederland over de invulling van dit concept, maar wordt ook een vergelijking gemaakt met rechtspraak van het EHRM over de schending van het recht op informatie in medische aansprakelijkheidszaken. De vraag is met name hoe de begrenzing van deze schadepost eruit zou moeten zien.

This article considers the effect of austerity-induced public spending cuts on the English civil justice system. In doing so it initially examines two fundamental changes engendered by the effect austerity has had on civil court fees and legal aid: first, a challenge to the traditional commitment in English procedure to adversarial process, and a concomitant increase in inquisitorial or investigative processes; and secondly, the growth in use of unqualified individuals to act as advocates in court for individual litigants who are unable to afford legal representation. It then turns to consider what, if any, effect austerity has had on simplified processes available in English civil procedure.

In the Netherlands, patients have a large number of options to express their dissatisfaction about the services provided by health care providers and can institute all kind of (quasi) legal procedures. None of these procedures was however introduced to ensure patients’ right to access to justice. Access to justice for health care providers confronted with complaints by patients is even less guaranteed. An analysis of Dutch law and practice learns that the access to justice has not found an inroad in the health care sector yet. This is not to suggest that patients lack legal rights, but if access to justice was taken as a yardstick to measures laws against the health care sector, they would have looked differently.

The paper offers a legal theoretical analysis of the disciplinary character of the contemporary practice of legal scholarship. It is assumed that the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement are particularly revealing about the nature of legal scholarship. The paper argues for an understanding of legal scholarship that revolves around cultivating doctrinal knowledge about law. Legal scholarship is characterised as a normative and interpretive discipline that offers an internalist and non-instrumentalist perspective on law. The paper also argues that interdisciplinary engagement is sometimes necessary for legal scholars because some concepts and ideas built into the doctrinal structures of law cannot be made fully intelligible by way of pure normative legal analysis. This point is developed with the help of an epistemological clarification of doctrinal knowledge and anchored in an account of the practice of legal scholarship. The paper explores the implications of this account by way of analysing three paradigms of interdisciplinary engagement that respond to distinctive challenges facing legal scholarship: (1) understanding better the extra-legal origins of legal ideas, (2) managing discursive encounters that can generate frictions between disciplinary perspectives, and (3) building the knowledge base to handle challenge of validating policy initiatives that aim at changing the law. In different ways, all three challenges may require legal scholars to build competence in other disciplines. The third paradigm has particular relevance for understanding the methodological profile of legal scholarship. Legal scholarship is the only discipline with specific focus on how the social environment affects the doctrinal structures of law.

This article examines the importance of the social evidence base in relation to the development of the law. It argues that there is a need for those lawyers who play a part in law reform (legislators and those involved in the law reform process) and for those who play a part in formulating policy-based common law rules (judges and practitioners) to know more about how facts are established in the social sciences. It argues that lawyers need sufficient knowledge and skills in order to be able to critically assess the facts and evidence base when examining new legislation and also when preparing, arguing and determining the outcomes of legal disputes. For this reason the article argues that lawyers need enhanced training in empirical methodologies in order to function effectively in modern legal contexts.

Family relations in Syria are governed by a plurality of personal status laws and courts. This plurality manifests itself on a variety of levels, including statutory, communal and individual. In this article, the author argues that, albeit this plurality, Syrian personal status law is also characterised by the prevalence of shared, gendered norms and views on marital life. Based on fieldwork conducted in a Catholic and a shar’iyya personal status courts in Damascus in 2009, the author examines the shared cultural understandings on marital relationships that were found in these courts, and as laid down – most importantly – in the respective Catholic and Muslim family laws. The article maintains that the patriarchal family model is preserved and reinforced by the various personal status laws and by the various actors which operated in the field of personal status law. Finally, two Catholic case studies are presented and analysed to demonstrate the importance and attachment to patriarchal gender norms in the Catholic first instance court of Damascus.

Visscher gives an overview of the empirical research on the deterrent effects of tort law within the domain of traffic accidents. An impressive amount of law and economics research has been done in the last few decades. This has resulted in special attention for the deterrent effects of the financial incentives which are embedded in various legal systems. Contradictory empirical evidence motivates Visscher to reflect on methodological issues. A major shortcoming of most studies is that the dependent and independent variables are not properly defined and distinguished. Another difficulty is to properly assess the influence of the introduction of the no-fault system on incentives: no-fault not only implies that the prevalence of the tort-system is more-or-less marginalised, but also that it transforms the extent to which the damages of those injured are covered by insurances in various ways. It is not easy to isolate both factors properly. Nevertheless, Visscher finds enough support in the empirical evidence to conclude that, without added financial deterrence incentives, no-fault schemes are likely to lead to increased accident rates, more injuries and more fatalities.

Van Velthoven and Van Wijck review empirical studies on the effects of tort law in the medical sector. The data they present comes mainly from the US, because from the 1970’s US states have enacted a variety of reforms in their tort systems. This variation has provided very useful data to study preventive effects. The empirical evidence analysed shows that medical malpractice risk affects the behaviour of health care providers. It has a negative impact on the supply of services and it encourages extra diagnostic testing;yet if the additional tests and procedures have any value, it is only a marginal one. Furthermore it has been found that changes in the supply of services do not affect health adversely. This suggests that the physicians who are driven out of business have a below average quality of performance. The authors conclude that, at the margin, medical liability law may have some social benefits after all.

Schwitters focuses on the differences between economic and a sociological perspectives on non-pecuniary damages. By exposing the alternative perspectives on this issue, he illuminates some methodological differences between both disciplines. Although law and economics has had a positive influence on empirical research, he questions the merits of this perspective when analysing non-pecuniary damages. Law and economics regards non-pecuniary damages exclusively as a financial incentive to realise optimal deterrence and maximisation of welfare. Alternatively, in sociology of law there is also attention for the symbolic dimension of law in which rules are seen as normative standards of behaviour. Compensation is a way to bring the wrongdoer to recognise that he has done wrong and has to compensate the victim, and to show the victim that his rights are taken seriously. Through a sociological lens, the adoption of an exclusively economic model of human behaviour has to be questioned. To what extent human behaviour is really influenced by either financial incentives or by normative standards of behaviour is an open empirical question. Finally, he argues that the decision to base our institutions (such as law) on economic underpinnings is a decision which itself cannot be based on an economic procedure of aggregating individual preferences and maximising welfare.