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…

Julie Fraser The Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) held their 16th annual conference on 21-22 September 2015 in Serbia, hosted by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights.  This blog gives a brief overview of my experiences at the conference. The theme of the conference was Human Rights and Universality, in acknowledgment of the new…

Judges in the Netherlands are rebelling against the endless series of changes in the organization of the judiciary. What is occurring is more than a simple merger; the organization has become too dominant in the judges’ work. Judges do substantive work. They give judgments in other people’s disputes. To be able to do that work…

Rick Verschoof This week I realized that during my entire professional life I have had to deal with changes. This already started when I was still working at the UU from 1985 until 1994. Simply in the education I experienced the semester system (2 teaching periods), the ‘block system’ (5 teaching periods) and the trimester…

Eddy Bauw The statement made during the Euro Summit on Greece on the 12th of July following 17 hours of meetings included one measure which has received less attention than the other (serious) demands made against Greece to qualify for new loans (Euro Summit Statement Brussels, 12 July 2015 (SN 4070/15)). One of the measures…

Wibo van Rossum While researching the challenge procedures (publication, ‘Wraking bottom-up’ in 2012 and the current research into the ‘pilot externe wrakingskamer’) I became interested in the querulant. Querulants, in my opinion, challenge a judge more often than other citizens. They are also partly classified by this characteristic. Erhard Blankenburg has previously said that with…

Marc Simon Thomas In the NRC Handelsblad a piece written by my colleagues Grootelaar and Van den Bos was recently published on the new mediation legislation. Apart from this article the public debate concerning mediation appears to be at a standstill for some time. The lull before the storm, I suppose. Although the private member’s…

Leonie van Lent As fits a centre of research on judicial administration, earlier blogs have dealt with urgent questions about the adherence to the rule of law and the functioning of the judiciary in the Netherlands. The topic of pre-trial detention combines all those questions. Here the politics of safety, the politicization of constitutional guarantees…

Ton Jongbloed The judicially imposed penalty payment on a party not complying with a court order (dwangsom) was introduced in the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure in 1933. Through the rejuvenation in 1978, the regulation of the penalty payment is now equal in Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg law. The topic of the penalty payment is…