Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) is research in which legal questions are answered using empirical research methods. Traditionally, lawyers conduct normative, non-empirical research. Lately the legal discipline is increasingly interested in ELS. It is argued that we need more ELS. This raises the question to what extent Dutch researchers and practitioners conduct and apply ELS. In this article, we investigate the state of affairs of ELS in the Netherlands. We look at three different areas: legal research, legal education and legal practice. The data we use are legal PhD theses, legal course material, legislative proposals, and questionnaire data from legal practitioners. The methods are a systematic review, a quantitative content analysis, and a questionnaire research. Our study on legal research shows that researchers do apply empirical methods, but mainly the researchers with an education in social science. Our study on legal education shows that lawyers receive hardly any training on empirical research methods. Finally, our research on legal practice shows that practitioners and legislators struggle to apply empirical legal research. We plead for investments to enhance the production and usage of ELS, to prevent wrongful judicial decision-making, to generate effective legislation, and to create scientific innovation.

A common conception in the legal literature holds that in a given country, the law in force is to be understood against the background of shared beliefs about justice in that particular country. If that conception holds true, the applicable civil law in a particular country should reflect the shared views on ‘civil justice’ within that country and, as a result, citizens should reveal a preference for domestic civil law over the civil law of another country for a given case. In this research we empirically investigated to what extent the applicable law in particular cases corresponds to actual beliefs about what is seen as just in those situations. Does Dutch liability law in a particular case correspond with what citizens in the Netherlands consider to be just in that case? And does the applicable English liability law correspond to what English people consider fair in that case?
In an experiment we compared Dutch and English respondents’ views on the fairness of legal solutions in three different, hypothetical cases where Dutch and English legal solutions to the same case would diverge. We find that at the aggregate level, respondents indeed reveal a preference for the legal solution that is applicable in their own country, regardless of whether the different legal solutions are presented as applicable or not: Dutch respondents prefer Dutch civil solutions and English respondents prefer English civil solutions. However, we also observe differences between cases that make strong conclusions about a structural correspondence premature.

There is little known on settlement negotiations during civil lawsuits in the Netherlands. Settlement negotiations take place during a (suspension of the) public court hearing. The public hearing takes place in the majority of the civil lawsuits in the Netherlands. The qualitative empirical research I am carrying out, intents to give insight in these settlement negotiations and questions what lawyers actually do during these negotiations. The research intents to contribute to the effectiveness of settlement negotiations in the sense that (i) the number of settlements increases and of compulsory settlements decreases, (ii) the perceived fairness of procedure and outcome in settled cases increases, and (iii) the number of resolved underlying conflicts increases.
I expect to find that most settlement negotiations can be qualified as distributive negotiations (as opposed to integrative negotiations). Furthermore, based on a literature review on biases and heuristics I hypothesized that settlement could be more effective than they actually are. The paper touches on the methodology and on both hypotheses.

Legal institutions as well as European and international organisations have criticised Dutch policy regarding travellers (including Roma and Sinti living in a caravan). Main point of this criticism is that the Dutch government should do more to protect and facilitate the travellers culture.
In academic literature, the policy has also been criticised from a human rights perspective. In most of these official and academic publications the perspective of travellers was missing. This gave reason for a qualitative research in the form of ten interviews with travellers in the Netherlands. Questions as what does it mean to be a traveller, how should your culture be protected and what do you do to protect your culture (using the law for instance) were, among others, part of these interviews.
This article not only discusses the results of the interviews, but places them also against the theoretical background of legal consciousness, in particular the research of Ewick and Silbey (1998) in which three categories of attitudes towards the law and legal institutions were distinguished.
At forehand it was expected that, as being a minority group, travellers would fall in the category ‘against the law’. Yet the findings of this research suggest that travellers, at least the respondents, fall in the category ‘with the law’. They use the law to reach a better position, i.e. to protect their cultural identity.

In administrative law, a substantial number of citizens who are dissatisfied with government decisions go on to appeal their decision at a higher court. This article discusses how satisfied those appellants are about the procedure and the result.
The data presented demonstrate a substantial difference in appreciation of the procedure between winners and losers. In addition, many appellants experience a very low degree of distributive justice. In part, people show a fundamental distrust in the administration of justice, but for a greater part, people argue that the higher court judge has not assessed their case in an expert or fair way.
The most intriguing outcomes of the analysis concern the large majority, including both winners and losers, that claim that the verdict did not end the conflict with the counterparty. Additionally, almost everyone argues that they would file an appeal again, if presented with that possibility. The experienced dissatisfaction, skepticism and frustration regarding the procedure seem to have little or no influence on the willingness to return to the administrative higher court in the future.