In the Netherlands, patients have a large number of options to express their dissatisfaction about the services provided by health care providers and can institute all kind of (quasi) legal procedures. None of these procedures was however introduced to ensure patients’ right to access to justice. Access to justice for health care providers confronted with complaints by patients is even less guaranteed. An analysis of Dutch law and practice learns that the access to justice has not found an inroad in the health care sector yet. This is not to suggest that patients lack legal rights, but if access to justice was taken as a yardstick to measures laws against the health care sector, they would have looked differently.

In the course of it short existence, Socio-legal studies (SLS) in the Anglo-Saxon world has burgeoned into a rich and variegated field. Reviewing it is therefore a challenging task. I begin with some general reflections and an outline of recent developments. Although these indicate an extremely vibrant field, concerns have been expressed for the future. In my discussion of these, I argue that our analysis of SLS needs to be historicised since the emergence of SLS is connected to processes of social modernization and democratization. The erosion of these processes by neo-liberal discourses and policies is the background to a discussion of my own research into the impact of the cuts to civil legal aid in England and Wales. This leads me to conclude that the fundamental dissonance between neo-liberal rationality and social science may portend a difficult future, in particular for empirical work; however, I note too that other developments such as the ongoing juridification of society and new social media may make continued SL engagement irresistible.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in scientific malpractice. In the Netherlands, for example, several major cases of plagiarism, fabrication of data and falsification of findings have come to light. The scandal surrounding the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who simply made up the results of empirical research, prompted worldwide attention. As a result of these scandals, universities have, in the past few years, increased their efforts to better ensure the integrity of scientific research. In this process it is sometimes overlooked that scientific integrity is not a clear-cut concept. By examining three ethical issues relevant to criminological research, this article aims to illustrate that the assessment of integrity is a complicated matter. The first dilemma relates to maintaining confidentiality: how to ensure that the privacy of respondents is protected and the research will not harm their interests? The second dilemma has to do with the degree of openness and transparency required from the viewpoint of scientific accountability. How transparent can one be when it comes to conducting scientific research based on secret information and closed sources that are only accessible to the researchers? Finally, the third dilemma concerns the independent position of criminological research. What are the possibilities and limitations of free and independent research in the field of criminology?