In the past five years, the Council of State, the National Ombudsman and several academics have criticized the way in which new legislation has been made. In their view, principles of law and the rule of law are insufficiently uphold due to an instrumentalist view on law. This criticism urged the authors to conduct an empirical study into the question how legislative drafters deal with legislative plans which are problematic from a legal or rule of law point of view, and how they justify their role in the legislative process. This study is explorative and qualitative in nature. During the summer of 2018, 24 legislative lawyers from five different Dutch ministries have been interviewed. The results show that the role of legislative lawyers can best be characterized as constructively critical. As their tasks encompass much more than solely the actual drafting of legislation, they more and more resemble their colleagues from the policy department. The authors suggest that legislative lawyers should articulate their distinctive professional ethics in order to strengthen the checks and balances within the ministries.

Op overtreding van de inlichtingenplicht uit de Participatiewet staat een bestuurlijke boete. Aanvankelijk schreef de wet een relatief hoge boete voor (100% van het benadelingsbedrag). Echter, de CRvB heeft dit boetestelsel gematigd, met een beroep op de evenredigheid. Daartoe heeft het boetecategorieën geïntroduceerd (opzet, grove schuld, normale verwijtbaarheid en verminderde verwijtbaarheid) met bijbehorende boetehoogtes (100%, 76%, 50% en 25%). In de praktijk blijkt deze boetesystematiek niet goed werkbaar. De gemeentelijke boetefunctionaris kan moeilijk uit de voeten met dit begrippenkader, dat is ontleend aan het strafrecht. Gemakshalve kiest hij voor een boete die past bij normale verwijtbaarheid. Schiet de CRvB hiermee zijn doel voorbij?

Previous research on intergenerational continuity of crime is primarily focused on transmission from fathers to children. In this article, we aim to give insight in the role of mothers in (the prevention of) continuity of organized crime. The results of our explorative study on 25 organized crime offenders based in Amsterdam and their partners and children, show that parenting skills and norms and values of mother seem to have an important role in both the intergenerational continuity of organized crime and the prevention of the transmission.

Recently the Dutch Government has responded to an advise from the advisory body Raad van State concerning the relationship between the administrative and the penal system of sanctions.
Nowadays administrative sanctions are imposed in the Netherlands for serious offenses, whereas the original intention was to only use these procedures for minor felonies. It is unclear why some offenses are subject to a judicial judgment, while others are dealt with in administrative proceedings. Moreover, it appears that the administrative fines are often significantly higher than fines imposed by a judge. The government feels that harmonisation between the maximum of the administrative and penal fine should be realized. With regard to the choice between administrative and penal law, the government hasn’t found a criterion for deciding which offenses should be subject to a judicial judgment and which can be dealt with in administrative proceedings. The authors argue that the government could have offered more clarity by using the criterion of ‘serious criminal conduct’ as defined in criminal law. Criminal law has to be chosen when there is serious criminal conduct. In other cases it is possible to choose the administrative procedure.

Tensions between the central national level and the local level become clearly visible in coffee shop policies, which have to fit within the international VN and EU treaties and strategies, national drug policy principles and local interests of public order. Three cases, all concerning long-term problems of drug tourism, nuisance and crime around coffee shops, illustrate these tensions. In the case of coffee shop Checkpoint near the Belgian border the Public Prosecutor aimed at solving the problem by prosecuting the coffee shop as a criminal network, while the mayor tried to minimize the negative effects by facilitating visitor flows. In the case of the private club and residence criterion in 2012 not all the mayors actually enforced these national criteria. This leads to a bigger emphasis on local tailoring. Thirdly, several mayors have opted for a regulation of cannabis production for coffee shops, while the stance of the national government is that international treaties banning this practice should be respected. The influence of local policies may be small, but in the end the local communities seem crucial when it comes to finding new ways of managing drug problems.