Claims have been made that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is more lenient in accepting age discriminating measures affecting older people than in those affecting younger people. This claim is scrutinised in this article, first, by making a quantitative analysis of the outcomes of the CJEU’s case law on age discrimination cases, followed by a qualitative analysis of the line of reasoning of the CJEU in these cases and concluding with an evaluation of the Court’s reasoning against three theoretical approaches that set the context for the assessment of the justifications of age discrimination: complete life view, fair innings argument and typical anti-discrimination approach. The analysis shows that the CJEU relies more on the complete life view approach to assess measures discriminating old people and the fair innings argument approach to assess measures discriminating young people. This results in old people often having to accept disadvantageous measures and young workers often being treated more favourably.

Deze bijdrage analyseert de ontwikkeling van bijna vijf jaar literatuur en jurisprudentie met als doel te bezien hoe de rechtspraktijk is omgegaan met de verstoorde arbeidsverhouding als redelijke grond voor ontslag.

Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp is the auctor intellectualis of the 1818 Dutch constitution. It was his sketch for a new constitution that was used as a starting point for the deliberations of its original drafting committee. Van Hogendorp justifies his constitution as a restoration of the Burgundian constitution that applied before the Dutch Republic. In recent literature Van Hogendorp’s restorational argument is presented as an invention of tradition. In this article an alternative explanation is presented, namely that it is part of a form of classicist political thought that was common during the ancien régime. Van Hogendorp describes his constitution as a moderate monarchy, in which the three principles of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy are properly balanced. And he mainly defends this mixed regime by pointing out that it is a restoration of the old Burgundian constitution of the Netherlands. This way of reasoning is, as will be shown, typically classicistic.

Criminologists generally regard below-average intelligence as a robust correlate of delinquency and crime. In this article the author argues that the negative association between IQ and crime could be explained at least in part by a lack of research access to gifted adults who possess wealth, power and privileges. Asking these adults about other types of offending (e.g. white-collar crimes) than usual in self-report studies might uncover a positive relationship between IQ and prevalence rates, in accordance with the results of the exploratory study underlying this article. As a consequence different conclusions about the linkages between intelligence and crime might have to be drawn.

Het aloude adagium in pari delicto wordt in de jurisprudentie maar zelden in expliciete bewoordingen gebruikt. Het heeft in Nederland echter wel degelijk betekenis. Onbetamelijk gedrag van de benadeelde zou zelfs vaker reeds bij de vestiging van aansprakelijkheid in beeld moeten komen, en niet pas bij de omvang van aansprakelijkheid.

De (hoofdelijke) aansprakelijkheid van de tweedegraadsbestuurder uit onrechtmatige daad jegens vennootschapscrediteuren van de kleindochter staat in deze bijdrage centraal. Meer in het bijzonder de vraag of de aansprakelijkheid ex artikel 2:11 BW van de tweedegraadsbestuurder een vorm van risicoaansprakelijkheid in het leven roept voor het gedrag van de medetweedegraadsbestuurder die een onrechtmatige daad pleegt jegens vennootschapscrediteuren van de kleindochter.

Recent figures indicate that certain drug markets, or at least parts of it, shift from the Netherlands to Belgium. However, it is still unclear whether it is a displacement of some parts of the illicit drug markets or whether it should be seen as a diversification of certain parts of some illicit drug markets in terms of spreading of risks and taking profit of new opportunities. In this respect, this article contributes to an ongoing research (DISMARK) by providing an overview of drug policy measures most recently taken by the Netherlands, from a Belgian point of view, and by trying to link these developments to drug-related trends in Belgium. It is clear that both countries will have to invest in a common approach of their common drug problems. However, it is not yet possible to draw any profound conclusions on the actual displacement of illicit drug markets.

In this paper, an attempt is made to work out a methodology for comparative legal research, which goes beyond the ‘functional method’ or methodological scepticism.
The starting point is the idea that we need a ‘toolbox’, not a fixed methodological road map, and that a lot of published, but largely unnoticed, research outside rule and case oriented comparative law offers varying approaches, which could usefully be applied in comparative research. Six methods have been identified: the functional method, the structural one, the analytical one, the law-in-context method, the historical method, and the common core method. Basically, it is the aim of the research and the research question that will determine which methods could be useful. Moreover, different methods may be combined, as they are complementary and not mutually exclusive.This paper focuses on scholarly comparative legal research, not on the use of foreign law by legislators or courts, but, of course, the methodological questions and answers will largely overlap.

Since mid-January 2015, nearly 300 soldiers were mobilized by the Belgian government to ensure the safety of public places in Liège, Brussels, Antwerp and Verviers, providing assistance to local and federal police forces. This provoked intense political and public debate about the issue of the provision of security in a democratic society, raising questions such as: which are the goals of security policies and what kind of risks are they supposed to address? Which control instances should be responsible for the provision of security and how should they operate? The central issue, here, is whether either civilian or military actors and practices are the most appropriate for surveillance and policing tasks. As a matter of fact, this discussion goes back to the Belgian independence and has marked the entire history of the Belgian police system, since at the heart of it, there has long been a military police force, the gendarmerie. In this contribution, we examine how the militarization of security and policing tasks evolved across the twentieth century in Belgium, which socio-political conditions shaped these evolutions, and what kind of arguments pro or contra military approaches have been advanced in this process.

This contribution focuses on the manner in which between 1880 and 1940 private actors in the port of Antwerp, whether or not in cooperation with the public authorities, interpreted crime and crime control in terms of risk management, loss prevention and situational crime prevention through a strict economic approach, as opposed to the then dominant institutionalized and criminological discourse. Whereas crime control by the major criminal justice institutions put an emphasis on the biological, psychological and sociological characteristics of the offender, measures taken by maritime, industrial and commercial organizations were aimed exclusively at manipulating the temporal and spatial dimensions of the opportunity structures in which criminal activities, which posed a threat to the economic profitability, could develop.

Communities can only be dynamic and projective, that is, oriented towards new and better forms of cooperation, if they bring together diverse people in a common, and hopefully more equal, socio-political life and in welfare. The latter requires not only back-stretched connections, that is, the involvement of co-nationals and naturalized persons, but also forward-starched connections, that is, the involvement of citizens in waiting. Societal integration is an unhelpful notion and liberal democratic polities would benefit from reflecting critically on civic integration policies and extending the norm of reciprocity beyond its assigned liberal national limits. Reciprocity can only be a comprehensive norm in democratic societies - and not an eclectic one, that is, either co-national or co-ethnic.