In this paper a literature review is used to explore the role that commercial contracts concluded between private actors play as instruments of regulatory governance. While such contracts are traditionally seen as a means to facilitate exchange between market participants, it is argued in the literature that commercial contracts are becoming increasingly important vehicles for the implementation and enforcement of safety, social and sustainability standards in transnational supply chains. The paper maps the pervasiveness of this development, its drivers, and the governance challenges that arise from it. While doing so, the paper more generally explores the relationship between regulation and contract law.

In a neoliberal age governments, NGOs, food producers and retailers all state that the food system can be governed via consumer choice aka voting with your fork. This makes the retail food label an important space for contests between different actors who each seek to govern the food system according to their own interests and priorities. The paper argues that this makes it crucial to ‘backwards map’ the regulatory governance networks behind the governance claims staked on food labels. The paper uses the example of the contested meaning of ‘free-range’ claims on animal products in Australia to propose and illustrate a methodology for this backwards mapping.

Op 14 maart 2014 is de nieuwe Tabaksrichtlijn 2014/40/EU (hierna: de Richtlijn) vastgesteld. De nieuwe Tabaksrichtlijn brengt een ingrijpende wijziging op het gebied van de productie en distributie van tabaksproducten met zich mee. Op 20 mei 2016 moet de Richtlijn in de Nederlandse wetgeving zijn geïmplementeerd. In deze bijdrage worden de belangrijkste kenmerken van de Richtlijn besproken en wordt kort ingegaan op de gevolgen voor de Nederlandse rechtsorde.
Richtlijn 2014/40/EU van het Europees Parlement en de Raad van 3 april 2014 betreffende de onderlinge aanpassing van de wettelijke en bestuursrechtelijke bepalingen van de lidstaten inzake de productie, de presentatie en de verkoop van tabaks- en aanverwante producten en tot intrekking van Richtlijn 2001/37/EG, Pb. EU 2014, L 127/1.

Food fraud is as old as mankind but has advanced in the last decades. Fraud regarding the gross composition of food has progressed in the direction of the addition of unconventional adulterants. Furthermore, consumers are more and more interested in how and where their foods are produced and pay price premiums for organic foods, fair trade, animal welfare considering, and sustainable food products. Since these products are very similar to their conventional counterparts in terms of composition, they provide an additional challenge. The knowledge regarding occurrence, type of meat fraud, causes and damage caused to the sector is limited. There is a need for extensive identification of the vulnerabilities and criminogenic factors. These insights offer leads for detection and prevention. The article deals with a first step into the inventory of these vulnerabilities and factors affecting meat fraud, by assessing fraud risks related to products, companies and the meat supply chain.

This paper provides an account of what makes age discrimination special, going through a set of possible justifications. In the end, it turns out that a full understanding of the specialness of age-based differential treatment requires that we consider together the ‘reliable proxy,’ the ‘complete-life neutrality,’ the ‘sequence efficiency’ and the ‘affirmative egalitarian’ accounts. Depending on the specific age criteria, all four accounts may apply or only some of them. This is the first key message of this paper. The second message of the paper has to do with the age group/birth cohort distinction. All measures that have a differential impact on different cohorts also tend to have a differential impact on various age groups during the transition. The paper points at the practical implications of anti-age-discrimination law for differential treatment between birth cohorts. The whole argument is confronted all along with ECJ cases.

This article provides a theoretical analysis of the label ‘resistance’. It sets out from the premise that the notion of resistance, although it has been current in criminology for some time, is still vaguely defined. We argue that resistance is not just a negative term, but can also be seen as a positive and creative force in society. As such, the primary function of resistance is to serve as a solvent of doxa, to continuously question obviousness and common sense. In the process of resistance we distinguish three processes: invention, imitation and transformation. The third stage warrants deeper investigation within cultural criminology.