Een rechtsstaat is gebaseerd op zelfbinding van de overheid aan het recht. Deze zelfbinding moet verankerd zijn in regels die onder meer de onafhankelijkheid van de rechterlijke macht vastleggen. De ontwikkelingen in Polen en elders tonen echter aan dat juridische regels van zelfbinding geen blokkades maar verkeersdrempels zijn op de weg naar despotisch bestuur. Een rechtsstaat vereist vooral een cultuur van zelfbinding. De conceptualisering van deze rechtsstaatcultuur staat nog in de kinderschoenen.

Voor het evenwicht tussen de staatsmachten, maar ook voor de ontwikkeling van internationaal recht, is de wijze waarop de nationale rechter zijn rol vervult van belang: gedraagt hij zich als rechtsvormer of als een rechtshandhaver? Zowel de legitimatie en vorming van het internationale recht als de handhaving van de internationale verplichtingen van de Staat op nationaal niveau zijn hiervan afhankelijk. Deze belangen worden bezien vanuit internationaal perspectief en uiteengezet aan de hand van recente jurisprudentie.

Few legal theorists today would argue that the domain of law exists in isolation from other normative spheres governing society, notably from the domain of ‘politics’. Nevertheless, the implicit norm that judges should not act ‘politically’ remains influential and widespread in the debates surrounding controversial court cases. This article aims to square these two observations. Taking the Miller v. Secretary of State and Urgenda cases as illustrative case studies, the article demonstrates that what it means for judges to adjudicate cases ‘apolitically’ is itself a matter of controversy. In reflecting on their own constitutional role, courts are forced to take a stance on substantive questions of political philosophy. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the ‘norm of judicial apoliticality’ should therefore be rejected. The norm’s coherence lies in its intersocial function: its role in declaring certain modes of judicial interpretation and intervention legitimate (‘legal’/‘judicial’) or illegitimate (‘political’).

In this article we elaborate on the place of religion in the workplace. Does the individual freedom of religion imply that employers must always accommodate the religious claims of employees or can they boast a number of arguments allowing them to legitimately limit that freedom? And, conversely, do employers not also have a right to freedom of religion and a right to formulate certain religious expectations for their employees? In this contribution, we deal with these and related questions from a legal-philosophical perspective. The overall aim is to illustrate the extent to which univocal answers are jeopardized because of conceptual ambiguities. We first make a normative distinction between two strategies (i.e. difference-blind approach and difference-sensitive approach) and subsequently illustrate and elaborate on how and why these strategies can lead to different outcomes in legal cases. We illustrate the extent to which a contextual and proportional analysis can be a way out in theoretical and practical conundrums.

Ever since it was published in 2015, the judgment of the The Hague court in the so-called Urgenda-case, and the subsequent decisions of the appellate and cassation courts confirming it, have been met with repeated and vivid critiques. By recognizing the necessity of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and furthermore imposing a certain reduction level on the Dutch state, the judgments in the cases at hand gave rise to many questions concerning the position of the judiciary in the matter, and in Dutch society as a whole. This article attempts in the first place to situate the positions of the different actors intervening in the Urgenda-case within a legal-theoretical framework. The contribution subsequently explores the strategic possibilities that an alternative understanding of law could offer to the judges, focusing specifically on the use of legal instruments stemming from international law, brought into the reasoning of the national judge.

In dit artikel wordt de waarde van het instituut parlement verkend. Daartoe analyseert de auteur eerst een lezing die de Nederlandse staatsrechtsgeleerde C.W. van der Pot in 1925 over dit thema hield bij de VWR. Vervolgens wordt Van der Pots opvatting gecontrasteerd met de diametraal tegengestelde benadering van Carl Schmitt, die zich, rond dezelfde tijd, over dit vraagstuk boog in Duitsland. Tot slot schetst de auteur, via een alternatieve, wellicht excentrieke, interpretatie van Schmitt waar een belangrijke waarde van het moderne parlement zou kunnen liggen.

This paper examines how the distribution of social goods within a political community relates to decisions on membership boundaries. The author challenges two renowned accounts of such a relation: firstly, Walzer’s account according to which decisions on membership boundaries necessarily precede decisions on distribution; secondly, Benhabib’s account, according to which membership boundaries can be called into question on the basis of universalist claims. Departing from both accounts, the author concludes that actual changes in the pool of participants in practices of creation and exchange of social goods pressure a political community to redefine its distributive patterns and, accordingly, the boundaries of its formal political membership. This claim will be supported by the analysis of threshold cases decided by the EU Court of Justice, in which EU citizenship is invoked with the atypical purpose of granting rights to a specific group of non-formal members.

As part of a package of legislative measures concerning cybercrime, the Dutch State Secretary for Security and Justice proposes to criminalize virtual grooming, that is the grooming of a person of minor age who, for example, does only exist as an online creature. The legislator’s principle argument for criminalization is based on the harm principle. This article examines the possibility of founding the criminalization of virtual grooming on this principle.

Naar aanleiding van het optreden van Paul Cliteur in het Wilders II-proces rijst de vraag hoe de inzet van een rechtsgang zich verhoudt tot de eigen aard van de filosofie. Aan de ene kant vertolkt filosofie precies dat register van waarheid dat in het recht aan de orde is. Aan de andere kant is die vertolking zo oneindig open dat ze strijdt met het gesloten karakter van het recht als een proces dat conflicten moet beëindigen door gezagvolle beslissingen. Socrates’ optreden in zijn eigen proces toont aan: de slechtste dienst die de filosofie het recht kan bewijzen, is het verlengstuk te worden van het positieve recht en zich bij voorbaat beschikbaar te stellen als een vindplaats van argumenten wanneer de juridische argumenten op zijn. De slotparagraaf argumenteert dat Cliteur deze socratische les terzijde legt. Als gevolg daarvan geeft hij een geforceerde lezing van het Felter-arrest en mist hij de kern van het begrip ‘onverdraagzaamheid’.

The central question in this article is whether an empirical-legal approach of victimhood and victim rights could offer a sufficient basis for proposals of legal reform of the legal system. In this article, we choose a normative-critical approach and raise some objections to the way in which part of such research is currently taking place in the Netherlands, on the basis of two examples of research in this field, one dealing with compelled apologies as a possible remedy within civil procedural law and the other with the victim’s right to be heard within the criminal legal procedure. In both cases, we argue, the strong focus on the measurable needs of victims can lead to a relatively instrumental view of the legal system. The legal system must then increasingly be tailored to the wishes and needs of victims. Within this legal-empirical, victim-oriented approach, there is little regard for the general normative principles of our present legal system, in which an equal and respectful treatment of each human being as a free and responsible legal subject is a central value. We argue that results of empirical-legal research should not too easily or too quickly be translated into proposals for legal reform, but first become part of a hermeneutical discussion about norms and legal principles, specific to the normative quality of legal science itself.

In dit artikel presenteer ik een nieuwe ‘nominalistische’ theorie van de rechtssubjecten en laat ik zien waarom geen van de tot nu gepresenteerde theorieën de toets der kritiek kan doorstaan. Het artikel valt uiteen in een constructief en een kritisch deel. In het constructieve deel presenteer ik eerst de nominalistische theorie van de rechtssubjecten. Deze theorie richt zich op de persoonlijke elementen van het rechtssysteem en begrijpt rechtspersonen en organen als namen die uitsluitend bestaan binnen het rechtssysteem. In het kritische deel presenteer ik vervolgens een overzicht van de tot nu toe verdedigde theorieën van de rechtspersoon. Het gaat daarbij respectievelijk om de sociaal-biologische of organische leer, de sociologische leer, de sociologisch-juridische leer, de fictieleer en de leer van het (gepersonifieerde) normencomplex. Aan de hand van enkele algemeen geaccepteerde kenmerken van de rechtspersoon laat ik ten slotte zien waarom geen van deze alternatieve theorieën de toets der kritiek kan doorstaan.

In this article, we inquire the merits of criminalizing blasphemy. We argue that religious views do not warrant a separate treatment compared to nonreligious ones. In addition, freedom of speech must be balanced against the interest of those who may be aggrieved by blasphemous remarks. We conclude that penalizing blasphemy is undesirable. It is fortunate, in that light, that acts of blasphemy have recently been decriminalized in The Netherlands by removing blasphemy as an offense from the Criminal Code. Still, other provisions appear to leave enough room to reach the same result, making the removal a possibly virtually aesthetic change. In the international context, it would be regrettable for The Netherlands to forgo the opportunity to take a leading role.

Two phenomena that challenge theories of law in the beginning of the twenty-first century are the regulatory explosion and the emergence of horizontal and interactional forms of law. In this paper, I develop a theory that can address these two phenomena, namely legal interactionism, a theory inspired by the work of Fuller and Selznick. In a pluralist approach, legal interactionism recognizes both interactional law and enacted law, as well as other sources such as contract. We should aim for a pluralistic and gradual concept of law. Because of this pluralist and gradual character, legal interactionism can also do justice to global legal pluralism and to the dynamic intertwinement of health law and bioethics.

The author argues that normative questions in social law are in need of a more philosophical approach. This is particularly true for the evaluation of Work-first arrangements. She proposes to evaluate workfare policies from the perspective of the reciprocity principle as it is deployed in the work of the liberal egalitarians John Rawls and Stuart White. While Rawls’ interpretation of the reciprocity principle seems to be at odds with Dutch jurisprudence on workfare policies, which allows for Work-first arrangements within the boundaries that are set by article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights (a prohibition on compulsory labor), White’s approach rather encourages work obligations for welfare recipients, on the condition that citizens acquire individual drawing rights on collective participation funds.

In this article, the authors explore how active state support for religions and worldviews could be in accordance with the principle of liberal neutrality. They focus on the Belgian church-state policy because this policy is characterised by an explicit and extended form of active support for recognised worldviews. If this policy is in accordance with liberal neutrality, some other, weaker forms of state support for religions and worldviews may also be in accordance with this neutrality principle. In the light of these considerations, the authors make some suggestions about possible ways to bring the Belgian church-state policy more in accordance with liberal neutrality.