In dit artikel wordt de evaluatie van de Resource Management Act besproken. Deze wet is een integrale omgevingswet zoals die ook in Nederland wordt ingevoerd. Auteur gaat in op de kritische evaluatie en de lessen die hieruit kunnen worden geleerd voor de Nederlandse situatie.

Classic pragmatists like John Dewey entertained an encompassing notion of science. This pragmatic belief in the continuities between a scientific, ethical and cultural understanding of the world went into decline in the middle of the 20^th century. To many mid-century American and English philosophers it suggested a simplistic faith that philosophy and science could address substantive questions about values, ethics and aesthetics in a rigorous way. This critique of classic pragmatism has lost some of its force in the last few decades with the rise of neo-pragmatism, but it still has a hold over disciplines like economics and law. In this article I argue that this criticism of pragmatism is rooted in a narrow conception of what science entails and what philosophy should encompass. I primarily focus on one facet: John Dewey’s work on art and aesthetics. I explain why grappling with the world aesthetically, according to Dewey, is closely related to dealing with it scientifically, for instance, through the poetic and aesthetic development of metaphors and concepts to come to terms with reality. This makes his theory of art relevant, I argue, not only to studying and understanding law, but also to teaching law.

In 1932 the court room of the Juvenile Judge in Amsterdam was redesigned and this work was marked as 'spadework'. In 2021 in a joined project of law student and art students ‘Design of Justice’ a concept for a court room of the future is developed. Again 'spadework'? In this article the author reflects on this and other current developments in the field child-friendly justice in criminal youth cases.

States apply different material conditions to attract or restrict residence of certain types of migrants. But states can also make use of time as an instrument to design more welcoming or more restrictive policies. States can apply faster application procedures for desired migrants. Furthermore, time can be used in a more favourable way to attract desired migrants in regard to duration of residence, access to a form of permanent residence and protection against loss of residence. This contribution makes an analysis of how time is used as an instrument in shaping migration policy by the European Union (EU) legislator in the context of making migration more or less attractive. This analysis shows that two groups are treated more favourably in regard to the use of time in several aspects: EU citizens and economic- and knowledge-related third-country nationals. However, when it comes to the acquisition of permanent residence after a certain period of time, the welcoming policy towards economic- and knowledge-related migrants is no longer obvious.

The entry into force of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) pushed state obligations to counter prejudice and stereotypes concerning people with disabilities to the forefront of international human rights law. The CRPD is underpinned by a model of inclusive equality, which views disability as a social construct that results from the interaction between persons with impairments and barriers, including attitudinal barriers, that hinder their participation in society. The recognition dimension of inclusive equality, together with the CRPD’s provisions on awareness raising, mandates that states parties target prejudice and stereotypes about the capabilities and contributions of persons with disabilities to society. Certain human rights treaty bodies, including the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and, to a much lesser extent, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, require states to eradicate harmful stereotypes and prejudice about people with disabilities in various forms of interpersonal relationships. This trend is also reflected, to a certain extent, in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. This article assesses the extent to which the aforementioned human rights bodies have elaborated positive obligations requiring states to endeavour to change ‘hearts and minds’ about the inherent capabilities and contributions of people with disabilities. It analyses whether these bodies have struck the right balance in elaborating positive obligations to eliminate prejudice and stereotypes in interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, it highlights the convergences or divergences that are evident in the bodies’ approaches to those obligations.

In this article, we focus on how the education system can be used to promote equality in the context of changing people’s hearts and minds – values, morals and mindsets. The duties contained in the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 (‘Equality Act’) bind private and public schools, educators, learners, governing bodies and the state. The Equality Act calls on the state and all persons to promote substantive equality, but the relevant sections in the Equality Act have not been given effect yet, and are therefore currently not enforceable. We set out how the duty to promote equality should be concretised in the Equality Act to inter alia use the education system to promote equality in schools; in other words, how should an enforceable duty to promote equality in schools be fashioned in terms of the Equality Act. Should the relevant sections relating to the promotion of equality come into effect in their current form, enforcement of the promotion of equality will take the form of obliging schools to draft action plans and submit these to the South African Human Rights Commission. We deem this approach inadequate and therefore propose certain amendments to the Equality Act to allow for a more sensible monitoring of schools’ duty to promote equality. We explain how the duty to promote equality should then play out practically in the classroom to facilitate a change in learners’ hearts and minds.

Met het verschijnen van de Better Regulation Agenda in 2015 presenteert de Europese Commissie één samenhangend wetgevingsbeleid, dat voorheen versnipperd was over verschillende domeinen en documenten. In het nieuwe beleidsdocument wordt bovendien de nadruk gelegd op het feit dat wetgevingstrajecten niet lineair zijn, maar juist cyclisch verlopen. Hierdoor is de koppeling tussen impact assessments vooraf en wetsevaluaties achteraf nog belangrijker geworden. In dit artikel wordt bezien wat de stand van zaken is van dit wetgevingsbeleid, met de nadruk op de koppeling van de beleidsinstrumenten. Specifieke aandacht is er voor de samenwerking tussen de drie EU-instellingen op dit gebied.

In de Nederlandse rechtspraktijk kan de rechter een beroep op een strafuitsluitingsgrond verwerpen als blijkt dat de verdachte een zekere mate van eigen schuld heeft, ondanks dat de (overige) voorwaarden zijn vervuld. In de literatuur worden bezwaren aangevoerd tegen deze pragmatische benadering en zijn alternatieve aansprakelijkheidsmodellen tot stand gekomen: eigen schuld als zelfstandig strafbaar feit en de actio libera in causa. In deze bijdrage worden beide modellen beschreven en vergeleken met de Nederlandse benadering.

This article tells the story of University of Strathclyde Mediation Clinic through the eyes of its founder. Taking its first case in 2012, by the start of 2021 it will be providing a free mediation service in 16 of Scotland’s 39 sheriff courts, covering more than half the country’s population. Yet it started with no plan, no budget and a few volunteers. The article makes the case that mediation clinics, like mediation itself, call for improvisation, coining the term ‘pracademia’ to describe how such clinics straddle the two worlds of practice and theory.

As mediators we should be aware of our biases. We cannot avoid them, although we need integrity and impartiality while helping people communicate and negotiate in their search for conflict resolution. The mediator’s job is delicate and important, as we ‘play’ with people and their underlying interests, emotions and identity. That is also the case in business mediation, where it all seems to be just professional and some feel emotions are to be avoided.
Mediators need much intrapersonal work to stay balanced and to manage their own biases. In this article a 5 step Managing Biases Process (5MBP) is suggested.
To do this honestly and seriously, and to keep growing, we need a ‘sparring partner”. Such mediator buddy contributes to our checks and balances, and better guarantees the integrity of the mediator.

This article considers how empirical legal studies (ELS) and doctrinal legal research (DLR) interact. Rather than seeing them as competitors that are methodologically independent and static, it suggests that they are interdependent activities, which may each be changed by interaction with the other, and that this change brings both opportunities and threats. For ELS, the article argues that DLR should properly be understood as part of its theoretical framework, yet in practice little attention is given to doctrine in empirical work. Paying more attention to DLR and legal frames generally would help ELS meet the common criticism that it is under-theorised and excessively policy oriented. On the other hand, an embrace of legal thinking, particularly of critical legal thinking, might lead to loss of status for ELS in policy circles and mainstream social science. For DLR, ELS offers a chance for it to escape the threat of insular sterility and irrelevance and to participate in a founded commentary on the world. The risk, however, is that in tailoring legal analysis to what can be empirically researched legal scholars become less analytically ambitious and more safe, and their traditionally important role as a source of socially relevant critique is weakened. Inevitably, in offering different ways of moving to normative conclusions about the law, ELS and DLR pose challenges to each other, and meeting those challenges will require sometimes uncomfortable self-reflection.

A recent rehabilitation theory, the ‘Good Lives Model’ (GLM), states that interventions that work towards a higher well-being can reduce recidivism risk more sustainably by promising a happier, pro-social life, rather than just a less harmful one. Although the GLM theory appears promising, limited empirical research has examined its underlying assumptions, applicability and its effectiveness. Research into the GLM with youth is even more limited. Therefore, in the current study, we investigate the main etiological assumptions of the GLM in a large group of adolescents between 14 and 18 years old from the general population (N=5.776), by means of self-report survey data on well-being, primary human goods and delinquency. The results show that a lower subjective global well-being is related to delinquent behavior. Especially the primary human goods of relatedness and working towards a financially stable future appear to be important goals for interventions aimed at rehabilitation of juvenile offenders.

This article investigates whether cyber delinquent behaviour of school friends, other offline friends and online contacts is related to cyber delinquent behaviour of individuals, and whether this relation differs for cyber dependent, cyber enabled and traditional crime. We used both direct and indirect measures of cyber delinquency of friends. We employed data from the first wave of a large-scale study on the causes of online delinquency among Dutch juveniles (n=889; mean age=16.8 years). The results suggest that both direct and indirect measures of levels of friend delinquency were related to levels of individual cyber offending. However, indirect measures had a stronger association with individual online delinquency than direct measures. This suggests that respondents make incorrect estimates of their friends’ levels of online delinquency. Moreover, no differences were found in the strength of the relation between individual online offending and indirect measures of online offending of school friends, offline friends and online friends. This suggests that friends of different types all play an important role in individual online offending.