Public participation is an important issue in the forthcoming Dutch Environment and Planning Act (2021). The importance of participation is emphasized in numerous places in the parliamentary documents to the Act. This contribution discusses how the new Act gives legal substance to the objectives that the government is pursuing regarding participation and whether the involvement of citizens is indeed better imbedded by this act. It addresses the important subject of the ‘right moment of participation’ in the fragmented Dutch policy and decision system. Consecutively it deals with the question of potential legal consequences for non-compliance by administrative bodies to the legal participation obligations when drawing up plans and decisions. Can a citizen enforce (substantive) participation in the administrative court after the Environmental and Planning Act comes into force? The possibilities are limited. Findings show that the new Environment and Planning Act does not address the essential problems that arise with participation. The successful creation of local support, better quality and faster decision-making through participation all depend on how the (local) government shapes participation. From a legal perspective, the Environment and Planning Act makes little contribution to this. In the view of the authors this is not surprising, because the role of legislation in safeguarding substantive participation should not be overestimated.

The Crisis and Recovery Act and the Environmental Planning Act are analysed in this article as a form of communicative legislation. This approach to socio-legal analysis draws attention to the need to understand the symbolic effects of legislation as independent drivers of compliance. The modest legal effects of the Crisis and Recovery Act are contrasted with the more sizeable symbolic effects of this legalisation. In addition, the ex-ante evaluation of the Environmental Planning Act shows that the proposed legal changes can only provide a small impetus to the desired culture change, nonetheless there is potential for areas of this law to have symbolic effects as well. These could potentially contribute independently to its success.

Victims who suffer severe damages due to the act of a violent crime can request state compensation from the Dutch Violent Offences Compensation Fund (VOCF). VOCF workers who decide on these requests use their discretionary powers to translate the VOCF’s rules and policy into concrete actions. This study investigated (1) to what extent these VOCF workers match Lipsky’s definition of street-level bureaucrats and (2) what routines and heuristics they use to deal with time and information constraints. On the basis of document analysis and interviews, we found that the decision makers of the VOCF can to a certain extent be seen as street-level bureaucrats. To make decisions timely, some of them use routines such as the ‘downstream orientation’. This means that they award requests for compensation if they think that the applicant would be able to successfully contest a rejecting decision. To deal with a lack of information, they sometimes include a review clause in the text of a rejection decision. The use of heuristics was not found among the lawyers who decide in first instance, but in case of appeal hearings heuristics such as the affect and representativeness heuristic seem to play a role in the decision-making process. Future research should investigate whether these routines and heuristics lead to disparities in outcomes.

This paper analyses how street-level bureaucrats in the Netherlands decide on detaining asylum seekers. The paper is based on interviews with officers of the national police and the military police who take these decisions as part of their job. The relevant Dutch and European legal rules are not clear and unambiguous and the officers are given wide margins of discretion in making these decisions. Many interviewees said that they ultimately rely on their ‘feelings’. The paper therefore pays special attention to whether and how gut feelings and emotions of the officers influence their decision-making. In addition, the paper examines whether and how the increased use of ICTs and the Europeanisation of migration and asylum law have reduced the officers’ discretion and autonomy.

John Griffiths’ social working approach of legislation tries to estimate the direct effects of laws which prescribe certain behavior. The basic idea of the approach is that rule-guided behavior (direct effect) is influenced by the different groups citizens belong to. Griffiths refers to these groups using the concept coined by Sally Moore (1971) ‘semi-autonomous social fields’. Although Griffiths never formulated hypotheses regarding the relation between SASFs and direct effects, the article explores two of them: If the relevant SASFs accept the new norm, direct effects will occur; and if the relevant SASFs are not ‘though’ (and don’t accept the new norm) direct effects will occur. These two hypotheses are related to the results of smoking bans in bars in the Netherlands. The acceptance of the smoking bans in bars is low. The thoughness of the SASFs in bars and their organization differ in time and so did the compliance with the smoking bans. Because this article is not based on research that depart from the hypotheses, further research based on the hypotheses is needed to draw firm conclusions. The article is rounded up with a plea to use Griffiths approach in impact assessments of legislation.

Het Hof van Justitie van de Europese Unie heeft baanbrekende uitspraken gedaan, vooral als gevolg van prejudiciële vragen van nationale rechters op grond van art. 267 VWEU. Het zijn vooral niet-verwijzingsplichtige lagere rechters geweest die voor deze aanvoer hebben gezorgd. Dit artikel onderzoekt hoe dit kan worden verklaard en kijkt naar de motieven van Nederlandse lagere rechters om al dan niet prejudiciële vragen te stellen aan het HvJ. Het doet dit op basis van interviews met 22 rechters en een uitgebreide juridische analyse van uitspraken. Dit artikel toont aan dat met name pragmatische en praktische overwegingen een rol spelen bij het besluit om te verwijzen. Daarnaast laat dit artikel zien dat er meer verschillen zijn binnen een lidstaat dan tussen lidstaten onderling, met name tussen gerechtelijke instanties en individuele rechters.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has rendered landmark cases, especially following references for a preliminary ruling from national courts on the basis of Art. 267 TFEU. Primarily lower courts that are not obliged to refer have been responsible for such cases. This article examines how these references of lower courts can be explained by focusing on the motives of the Dutch lower court judges to refer, or not to refer. It does so on the basis of interviews with 22 judges and an extensive legal analysis of judgments. This article shows that practical and pragmatic considerations play an important role in the court’s decision to refer. In addition, there are more differences within one Member States than between EU Member States, especially between particular courts and individual judges.

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.

In this article Bart Schermer, describes the difficulties in regulating the internet. The global reach of the internet, the fact that it is for the most part owned by private actors and creates opportunities for anonymity challenge regulators. The article describes issues related to sovereignty and jurisdiction, ambiguity in legal texts and dependence on private sector actors. Possible solutions lie in global internet governance, institutional innovation and the internet’s architecture itself.

In this contribution it has been set out that trust in the Belgian justice system cannot be taken for granted. The article contains empirical research on the reporting of newspapers on the Belgian justice system and tries to uncover a possible causal relationship between reading certain newspapers and trust in the justice system. Although it turns out that quality newspapers report on the justice system in a more negative way, readers of popular papers have less trust in the justice system. A direct link between negative reporting and reduced trust was therefore not found. Socio-economic variables and the priming effect on punitive attitudes in popular newspapers are cited as possible explanations.

Derkje Hazewinkel-Suringa entered law studies only after marriage and fulfilling about fifteen years of motherhood duty. Once at the university however, she rapidly became a student-researcher, delivered a PhD dissertation on ownership transfer and was appointed as the first female law professor in 1932, at the age of 42. Her professorship was in a remarkably different field, namely criminal law. Twenty years later she published the Introduction to the Study of Criminal Law, which would become the basis for criminal law teaching in the Netherlands for decades. A major reason behind this success was that the book, emphasizing active study of the law rather than passive reproduction, coincided with the general sprit of the post war era. Besides her scholarly work in which balance and synthesis were the major features, Hazewinkel-Suringa was a very outspoken actor in matters political. In 1936, when virtually the whole country was trying to accommodate the rise of fascism in the mighty neighbouring country, she became member of an anti-fascism committee. In 1938 she wrote a plea to the minister of Justice to allow entry of German-Jewish children into the country. During the German occupation (1940-1945) she proposed to close the university because of the dismissal of Jewish professors. She continued her protests against the social mainstream after the war, e.g. writing against the reintroduction of the death penalty (primarily focused on collaborators with the German regime). Hazewinkel-Suringa’s acts of individual courage could not make a difference in the overall political atmosphere of these times.

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

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.

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.

The ‘Bureau Jeugdzorg’ is the gatekeeper in the field of youth care policy. From its start the Bureau has faced a difficult combination of empathy and social control. The individual youth was entitled to ‘a right on care’, which in practice was frustrated by long waiting lists. The mental health professionals also resisted the central role of the Bureau. So, soon after its inception Bureau Jeugdzorg is already in jeopardy. It is unlikely that the new political initiatives in this field will improve the legal protection of minors.

By the end of 2007, the world’s urban population had outnumbered the amount of people living in rural areas. Urbanization is expected to increase strongly in the developing world over the coming years, most of it through informal ways of accessing land and housing. In the initiatives of governments and donor organizations to deal with these developments, the concept of tenure security features increasingly prominently. It is inter alia expected to encourage investment in housing improvement, facilitate access to public services such as gas, water and electricity and also to make formal credit available. There is, however, no consensus as to what tenure security exactly means or how it is to be established. In the present paper, development policy based on establishing tenure security through land titling is critically examined and with the emphasis on urban informality in Latin America, an alternative concept of tenure security is proposed.

Like surfers, legislators … who wish to change everyday social norms must wait for signs of a rising cultural support, catching it at just the right time... (Kagan and Skolnick 1993: 85) The empirical study of the relation between the way a law comes into being and its effectiveness in practice is an underdeveloped subject in the sociology of law. In this article this relation is studied with respect to smoking bans in the Netherlands. The focus is on private companies in general, with special attention for Dutch cafés, bars, hotels and restaurants (where such a ban was recently introduced). Dutch smoking bans in private establishments were only enacted after the government was convinced of public support and after a period of selfregulation. This proved to be a good preparation. The general picture of the relation between the emergence and the effectiveness of smoking bans in Dutch hotels, restaurants etc. is much the same. However, there is one sector - bars, pubs and the like – in which the smoking ban has encountered problems. In this sector a fourth of the establishments refuse to comply. A question addressed in this article is whether the legislator acted too precipitously with respect to this sector. This is obviously the case: there is less public support for smoking bans in such establishments and there had not been a preparatory period of selfregulation.