Bas van Bockel According to art. 50 of the Treaty on European Union (“TEU”, Lisbon version), “any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. In February of this year the European Parliament published a briefing informing citizens and politicians of the backgrounds and the debate on…

Tom Zwart  Increasingly, in the West, in the class rooms of law schools and offices of foreign ministries, international law is being associated exclusively with courts and tribunals. The idea seems to be that something can only be regarded as law if it emanates from an international court. This judicialization of international law overlooks the…

Brianne McGonigle Leyh International criminal justice has a reputation for being slow and progressing at a ‘glacial’ pace. For example, it took the International Criminal Court (ICC) ten years before it handed down its first judgment in the Lubanga case after it started operating in 2002. Similarly, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia…

  Rolf Ortlep Introduction In my previous blog I gave a modest impetus to define the concept of ‘the unity of law’ and I have discussed a number of instruments which in any case (also) aim to optimize the unity of law. The following four instruments are distinguished: institutional reform, preliminary ruling procedure, coordination and…

Eddy Bauw Under the headline ‘The claim industry’, the Volkskrant on Saturday the 27th of February devoted attention to the increase in the number of collective redress procedures in the Netherlands. The figures presented by the newspaper are clear: organisations who allegedly represent half a million people, have in total claimed 1.6 billion euros in…

Rolf Ortlep In his ‘The Unity of Law 1: Blogging about the unity of law?’, Eddy Bauw gave an inspiring kick-off on the subject of the unity of law. It is the intention to – with this blog as a starting point – start a series about that topic. With this blog and the next…

Ivo Giesen In December 2015 my book ‘Principles of civil procedure’ was published as part of the Asser Procesrecht-series (‘Beginselen van burgerlijk procesrecht’ Wolters Kluwer: Deventer 2015). In this book, I discuss, after some general considerations, the guiding principles of civil procedure from a Dutch and European perspective. Based on the research into and the…

In Dutch administrative law, a familiar view entails that the administrative court should not ‘occupy the chair of the executive’. By virtue of its powers, the government would have a ‘discretionary latitude of decision’ in which it is only under democratic control; insofar as it is not a matter of a ‘criminal charge’ there is…

  Antoine Buyse Having a split personality is usually not seen as a positive thing. Not for the outside world, and not for the person itself. Robert Stevenson’s novel about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde famously showed how the constant shifting between personalities can almost destroy someone. A clear and unified self-perception and image is…

Eddy Bauw The kick-off Let me get straight to the point. The aim of this blog is to start a series about the ‘coherence of law’. The idea to do this arose after a session of the Montaigne Centre in July about this theme. During the session it became clear that the participants had rather…