We analyze two citizen collectives of ‘professional city makers’ who have shaped participation in circular area development in anticipation of the Dutch Environment and Planning Act. The activities of professional city-makers form an interesting new phenomenon that requires attention as well as the implications: it is precisely through the professionalism of the city-makers’ efforts that there is a regular tension in the participation process between their role as citizen and professional in their contact with the government. We therefore discuss how the participation of professional city-makers in area development exposes different paradoxes that must be taken into account in the further implementation of the Environment and Planning Act. In short, we argue that participation in the Act is presented in a traditional way and does not fit the new role of citizens in area development in the 21st century.

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 Environment and Planning Act (EPA), which will enter into force in 2021, has been called the most influential legislative reform in the Netherlands since World War II. This article forms the introduction to a special issue devoted to the EPA, in which scholars from various disciplines reflect on the societal and legal ramifications of this new act. The authors introduce the different articles but also offer their perspective on the emergence of this new field of research. Socio-legal research into such a vast new regulatory field benefits from the application of multiple perspectives and different research methods. Conspicuously, the authors of the various articles differ on how to assess the new regulation of Dutch spatial planning. Some are pessimistic, others strike a more optimistic note. In this introduction two more perspectives on the law are offered. The perspective of prefigurative law (Davina Cooper) embodies the more optimistic view, whilst the perspective of outsourced law (Pauline Westerman) sides with the pessimists.

The development of the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet) in the Netherlands is an example of an ongoing reform of environmental and planning law that started with big ambitions. This article uses the case of environmental space (gebruiksruimte) to illustrate that it is hard to achieve those ambitions. A bill of the Environment and Planning Act contained regulations to assign environmental space to actors and/or locations. The regulations lacked in subsequent versions of the Environment and Planning Act, especially in the act itself. Despite the fact that on policy level the concept of environmental space can still be used, the lack of a legally binding mechanism for assigning environmental space makes it unlikely that the concept will be used. This hampers realising the ambition to create coherent policies that integrate environmental and spatial planning. It also puts achieving the goal of the law at risk.

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.

This article is about the work of Wibo van Rossum who passed away in April 2018. Trained as a legal anthropologist he has conducted empirical research on the administration of justice in the Netherlands for many years. This anthology is about four research reports he produced and many articles he has written in two decades. This article provides an academic as well as a practical review of his work.

This quantitative empirical research project describes how notaries evaluate disciplinary jurisdiction. Findings show that perceived procedural justice matters for notaries’ trust in the disciplinary jurisdiction of their cases. For example, those respondents who had been involved in a disciplinary case themselves, rated the disciplinary judge with a 5.3 on a 10-point scale when procedural justice was perceived by them to be relatively low. In contrast, when respondents who had been involved in a disciplinary case perceived procedural justice to be relatively high they rated the disciplinary judge with 7.6 on the same 10-point scale. This suggests that perceived procedural justice matters among an interesting type of professionals (notaries) who are involved in an interesting procedure in their profession (a disciplinary evaluation of their professional handling) in which important decisions are made. The current paper can contribute to the development of a barometer of notary disciplinary law.

The topic of this article is the legal philosophical foundation of John Griffiths’s sociology of law. Griffiths has developed his foundation of sociology of law in discussion with three positions: legal realism, Hart and Dworkin. These three positions give three different answers on the question ‘what is law?’. In the first part Griffiths’s discussion of legal realism is analyzed. From the outset, a legal realistic approach to law has the benefit of its strong focus on the empirical determinants of predicting the outcomes of cases. Problematic, according to Griffiths, is a naïve instrumentalism, often related to legal realism. The second part on Hart’s theory discussed Hart’s notion of rule-following as the core of Griffiths’s sociology of law. Also the different perspectives on law are discussed. According to Griffiths, Black’s extreme external perspective is problematic, but Hart’s moderate external perspective is also not suitable for the external comparative purpose of sociology of law. In the third part, Dworkin’s theory is discussed. Griffiths, in my opinion, unsuccessfully, tried to reconcile Dworkin’s theory with legal positivism. Dworkin’s theory is an interpretive theory from the participant’s point of view, which makes it hard to use it as an adequate foundation of an empirical theory of law. For a sociologist of law, choosing an adequate conception of law is just as important as the choice for an empirical method. The contribution of Griffiths to sociology of law is in this sense unique and of great value for the sociology of law.

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.

This contribution focuses on John Griffiths’ relentless attempt at developing a general theoretical perspective for socio-legal studies. Hence, attention to Griffiths’ important contributions to legal pluralism and the social working of law approach is paid only in passing. Similar to a much earlier assessment, the analysis of Griffiths’ proposal in this contribution is quite critical. Measured against five criteria this author deems important for any socio-legal theoretical framework, the verdict is that Griffiths’ proposal falls short of all of them. The analysis itself focuses primarily on Griffiths’ attempt to redefine the subject for socio-legal studies in terms of social control, the way he uses the concept ‘law’, and his primary focus on rules and rule following. One overall conclusion is that Griffiths remained a legal scholar to a much greater extent than he would have liked.

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.

Similar to the more current Regulator Intermediary Target (RIT) model, Griffiths’ Social Working (SW) theory points to the relevance of intermediaries for explaining rule following behavior. In this article, the author applies both theories (RIT and SW) concerning the role of intermediaries in rule following to explain developments in Dutch prostitution policy: the non-implementation of the emancipatory, sex workers’ rights based approach, and its replacement by a more repressive policy of closing down sex facilities. The analysis shows that although both theories contain useful starting point for explaining these developments, the SW theory’s special value is its acknowledgement of how regulatory intermediaries operate in a social field with existing social rules and a specific balance of power. Such rules and power relations have put barriers to the implementation of the Dutch prostitution policy as formulated in 1999. As illustrated in the article, the SW- theory offers more tools than the RIT- model for an analysis of how legal rules work in practice.

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.