Because of the sharp contrast between the law-in-the-books and the law-in-action regulatory enforcement has always been a popular subject in socio-legal research. This paper looks back at forty years of Dutch research on regulatory enforcement, using several key publications in this journal from each decade. First, it is argued that these Dutch studies reveal three general themes: this research can be seen as a time machine that takes us back to some of the most important social and political events of the past decades, these studies emphasize the crucial role of individual enforcement officials, and in everyday enforcement state law only plays a limited role. Next, this review also discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of Dutch research. Most studies on regulatory enforcement are more interested in the role of the state than in the role of citizens and businesses. As a result, research focuses more on issues of effectiveness and less on questions of legitimacy. Finally, empirical research is seen as more important than theory development. Based on this overview, the author introduces a new research agenda for future research on regulatory enforcement.

A central ambition that Griffiths expressed rather frequently was to realize progress in the sociology of law by formulating informative theoretical propositions and testing them empirically according to the maxim of the critical-rational metatheoretical program of Karl Popper. Our analysis of Griffiths’s contributions suggests, however, that he actually refrained from following Popper’s path: to put a Problem – formulate a Theory – testing that provisional answer by empirical Observation. Instead, Griffiths focussed mostly on the rigorously clear formulation of concepts accordingly to his strong philosophical inclination.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

Judges in the Netherlands have recently expressed their concerns in the media over the organization of the judiciary and the pressure to deliver output. At the same time, they consider themselves highly loyal to their work. In this article we explore this seeming contradiction by studying the developments in the selection, training and organisation of the judiciary and considering the consequences that these developments could have on the loyalty of judges. In doing so, a distinction is made between loyalty to the profession, to the organisation and to colleagues. We follow Hirschman's theory on Exit, Voice and Loyalty and determine that the act of judges expressing their concerns (instead of exiting the judiciary) is essentially a sign of their loyalty. However, we reason that this displays more loyalty to the profession than to the organisation. Due to changes in the selection and training of judges, more candidates who were formerly employed in other settings, e.g. in advocacy, will enter the profession. With their socialisation taking place in a more business-like setting, where values such as efficiency and productivity are significant, it is expected that they will be more willing to accept the new public management values which are criticized by the present generation of judges.

Recently there have been several miscarriages of justice in the Netherlands, which were widely reported in the media. They show that much can go wrong with legal proof in criminal cases and that judges sometimes give limited justification for their decisions. Insights from the so-called story-based approach to legal proof can potentially assist to improve and to critically assess judicial decisions in criminal cases, thereby helping to reduce the chance of mistakes. The story-based approach involves constructing and critically analyzing at least two stories about what (might have) happened in a case that explain the evidential data. These stories have to be compared to each other in order to decide which story is the most plausible. The judge has to include the different scenarios in his judgment and he must explain why the scenario he had chosen is the most plausible. In my paper I first discuss why it is important that judges justify their decision in a verdict. Then I explicate the story based approach. After that I explain how applying the story based approach in the motivation can be useful and help to reduce the chance of a miscarriage of justice.

The distance between the public and the judiciary takes two forms: a punitivity gap and an accessibility gap. This article discusses both types of gap and elaborates on the issue of whether the existence of these gaps influences confidence in the judiciary. From the literature, it appears that the public is generally of the opinion that courts sentence too leniently. However, experiments show that when citizens receive information on a specific case, they become less punitive. Information provision may also help to bridge an accessibility gap, as does actual citizen involvement in the administration of justice. The relation between the gaps discussed and confidence in the judiciary is not clear as yet. The article discusses methods generally used to assess confidence and suggests that confidence may be increased by a reduction of the two gaps.

When the Allied victory over the Axis powers is becoming certain, American officials start making plans for the occupation of Germany. In the aftermath of the invasion in 1944, some of these plans are brought to the attention of the Secretary of the Treasury in Roosevelt’s war cabinet, Henry Morgenthau. These plans infuriate him, because he considers them too lenient on Germany, which in his opinion should be reduced to an agrarian economy after its Nazi leadership has been summarily executed. The President at first agrees with this line of action as do most of the members of his cabinet. The only one opposing these ideas is the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, suggesting economic reconstruction and an international tribunal instead. His opposition seems in vain, when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly agree to this course of action towards Germany during a meeting in Quebec. But the ‘Morgenthau plan’ unravels when it is leaked to the press and it causes an uproar. Roosevelt fears for his re-election chances and hastily retreats. But he makes no decision on the issue and Stimson has to wait for his opportunity. It comes in the person of a new President: Harry Truman. He agrees to Stimson’s proposal for an international tribunal and this brings the United States on board of an allied majority for what is later to become the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Could one imagine that up until the mid-1940s international treaties had been ratified on postal services, copyright protection, and whale hunting, but not on genocide? It was only after the Second World War that the deliberate and systematic destruction of groups was recognised as an international crime. There had not even been a name for this practice, which has existed since the beginning of humanity. The 1948 Genocide Convention, the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, was a milestone in the international protection of human rights, although several tragedies have shown that mere law is not sufficient to relegate genocide to the scrapheap of history. The initiator of the Convention was not a very well-known man. This article is about the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, who had, with unflagging zeal, devoted his life to the elimination of genocide.

This article paints Henk Leenen as the godfather of Dutch health law. Godfather because Leenendesigned his own version of health law, a version that is characterized by an emphasis on autonomy of the patient. And godfather because Leenen was one of the founders of the Dutch Association of Health Law and for many years the editor of its periodical. He succeeded to bind almost all health law scholars to this organization and his way of seeing health law. The article illustrates Leenen’s influence by describing his reading of autonomy in health law, by outlining his informal and formal position in the health law landscape and by sketching the coming into being and the content of two important laws: the Law on medical contracts and the Law on physician assisted death (‘euthanasia’).

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

Citizenship is a notoriously complex and an essentially contested concept which has been defined in many different ways. The only stable element in all these definitions seems to be that citizenship is primarily described in terms of the relationship between the political community and the citizen. This article aims to explain why citizenship is such a contested concept by showing that it is embedded in three very different normative traditions: the liberal conception of citizenship as a (legal) status, the republican conception of citizenship as an activity and the communitarian conception of citizenship as identity. Each approach emphasizes an important element of citizenship, but none of the three is comprehensive enough to provide a complete picture of what citizenship implies in contemporary constitutional democracies. At the same time they cannot simply be merged because they come from different normative traditions among themselves at odds with each other.This article starts by illustrating the three conceptions of citizenship on the basis of the underlying theoretical models: liberalism, republicanism and communitarianism. Section 3 discusses two mutual tensions between different conceptions of citizenship: first between the liberal and republican conception and then between the liberal and republican conception on the one hand and the communitarian conception on the other. In Section 4, this conceptual analysis is used to analyze a policy terrain that is explicitly embedded in the idea of citizenship, namely the integration of immigrants through naturalization policy. Section 5 concludes.

The citizen, understood in the classical republican sense as the political actor, is on occasion confronted with issues that concern the room for difference in politics. In the Netherlands, for example, the recent entrance of populist citizens in parliament is regarded as a problem by more deliberative citizens. Do populist citizens threaten ordinary politics or do ordinary citizens, on the contrary, restrict the space of politics too much? To prepare future research on this point, in this article three similar historical controversies in Dutch parliament are examined. In these cases citizens struggle with the problem how much room parliament ought to provide for the differences between them. In these cases citizens eventually grant each other the freedom to engage in politics in their own way, unless that way threatens the freedom of parliamentary politics itself. They defend the right to debate the widest range of issues in the sharpest way, for example, but prohibit making insults and endorsing illegal activities. Further research is needed to confirm and specify these still tentative conclusions.

Domestic workers in Saudi Arabia suffer from severely limited access to justice, which affects the conflicts they may have with their employers. As there is no bargaining in the shadow of the law, the more powerful party, employer, can usually enforce their preferred outcome. This article focuses on the question of why domestic workers’ access to justice is so limited; are the underlying causes comparable to the ones in other countries, or does it concern an issue specific to Saudi Arabia? Literature on domestic workers points at both gender and citizenship as factors that weaken the position of these female migrant workers in many societies. This article discusses to what extent these two factors limit access to justice in Saudi Arabia and concludes with some critical remarks concerning the concept of intersectionality.

The position of patients facing forced hospitalization in a mental health clinic develops both in a soft and in a hard direction. On the one hand there is a soft current of more empathy with legal protection and on the other hand a harder current that leads to a growing number of forced measures. This involves three dilemmas. First, legal intervention touches only upon the fringe and not upon the core of psychiatric treatment. Second, the problematic relation with the criminal justice sector and third, a lack of concern for what happens after the decision of the judge. Quality based peer review has not developed well in this sector. Forced hospitalization will remain sour for the near future.

Faced with increased individualization, debates on immigration and interna-tionalization, the Dutch government has recently appointed a Constitutional Review Commission to strengthen the Dutch constitution and enhance its social relevance. It is against this background that this article examines the place that the Dutch constitution currently holds in empirical and discursive understand-ings of citizenship in the Netherlands. From the vantage point of citizenship discourse, the interpretation of citizenship (burgerschap) in the Netherlands amongst policy-makers and the public at large hinges on civicness rather than on democratic citizenship, and departs from a strongly assimilationist perspec-tive: ‘burgerschap’ is essentially about participating in and adapting to the dominant culture. From the vantage point of the constitution, the current consti-tution’s main function is legal: constituting government powers and limiting their exercise. Legal scholars emphasize that the Dutch constitution hardly has a more symbolic or social role. These facts are contrasted with data from a representative survey under the Dutch adult population, which demonstrates how the Dutch hardly know anything about the contents of the constitution, but do have great confidence in the document, and consider it to be very important. Interestingly, respondents also emphasize the symbolic and societal function, in addition to the legal function of the constitution. This seems to point towards the possibility of an understanding of Dutch citizenship more firmly based upon the values embodied in the constitution.

A large share of policy interventions in the Netherlands is captured in laws. Despite the growing piles of evaluations of laws, a clear picture of the overall proceeds of laws is lacking so far. This contribution contains the results of a synthesis investigation into a large number of Dutch evaluations of laws. We collected 75 evaluation reports that were completed in the period 1998-2005, covering a variety of policy domains. We performed our synthesis on 59 methodologically sound reports, using a realist evaluation framework. First, we unravelled the various interventions in laws. We found that most interventions were directed at executive bodies rather than citizens or businesses. We also found that only part of the end objectives of laws were actually achieved.

In line with the realist evaluation approach, we then attempted to map out the chains of events (mechanisms) produced by interventions in laws. We found that many evaluations lacked an explicit reconstruction of these chains of events. Nevertheless, we found eleven basic mechanisms, for example ‘agencification’ and ‘self-management’, to recur across laws and across policy domains. Finally, we synthesised findings relating to the influence of context on the functioning of laws. We found, for example, that adjacent rules and regulations as well as managerial cultures inside implementing bodies affected the functioning of various laws to a significant degree.