The German lawyer / labour law professor Hugo Sinzheimer (1875-1945) has, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, contributed significantly to the legal recognition of the ‘collective labour agreement’. The imperative character of CLA provisions, now widely accepted all over the world, required a paradigmatic turn in the dominant private law perspective on labour relations. The paper tries to specify what made him able and prone to do this, both by reconstructing the legal and political discussion in Germany and the Netherlands and by relating elements of the process to social-scientific theories of institutional and intellectual innovation. I argue that his combination of commitments in various fields (legal practice, science, politics) allowed him to span the gap between the fields of labour relations and state law and to contribute to the constitutionalisation of labour relations.

The article deals with an unknown chapter of the history of Muslims in the Netherlands in the interwar period. It follows the public debate about the construction of the first mosque in The Hague before the Second World War. The first initiative was made in 1929 by the Dutch convert to Islam Mohammed Ali van Beetem, who played a leading role among the Indonesian Muslim community in the Netherlands. After more than two decennia of debate and negotiations with the municipal authorities in The Hague, the first mosque was finally built by the Ahmadiyya-mission in 1955.

This article examines how a liberal public morality can be most successfully defended against perfectionism. First of all the five most important liberal arguments for freedom are taken from what is called the liberal canon: a number of characteristic works of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls. These five arguments are identified as: social and political realism, respect for autonomy, fallibility of ideas, pluralism, and respect for reasonableness. Next, the persuasiveness of these arguments is assessed, starting with the argument of respect for reasonableness, which is at the heart of Rawls’s political liberalism. It is concluded that in itself this argument is not strong enough to persuade perfectionists. A powerful defence of a liberal public morality needs the other arguments for freedom as well. Finally, the paper outlines how these other arguments can strengthen the argument of respect for reasonableness in a coherent manner.

André Köbben’s academic career spans sixty years and he’s still going strong – just because he likes it so much. Doing research by himself, which took him for longer periods to Ivory Coast and Surinam apart from studying conflicts in the Netherlands, but also analysing research by others. He has always been interested in questions of ‘rule’ and ‘reality’: the discrepancy between what people say they do and what they actually are doing. He probed tribal disputes among the Agni, the Bete and the Djoeka, but also conflicting interests between managers ordering research and researchers producing unwelcome results. He is preparing a book on academic fraud.

This article describes the relation between the murder on the Walloon social-democratic politician André Cools on 18^th July 1991 at Liege and the corruption case Agusta - dealing with the purchase of army helicopters - in order to reflect on typical Belgian criminological issues in this political organized crime topic. The murder committed by Tunisian hit-men was ordered through the influence of the personal cabinet of Van der Biest, a former minister. During the murder investigation a link with the Agusta corruption case was discovered and would tear down several ministers as well as the former NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes. Due to the existence of especially journalistic sources and a lack of scientific criminological material, the conclusions of this article are strictly personal. The murder and the corruption prove the fact that political organized crime was a reality in Belgium. This case can stand as a scholarly example in the study of political organized crime in Belgium.

Het belang voor een benadeelde om het huis van het aansprakelijkheidsrecht binnen te komen, is evident. De selectiecriteria aan de poort zijn echter niet even helder en worden soms wel erg arbitrair toegepast.