Latest blog articles

In the past two years, I have worked on the legal consequences of the Volkswagen scandal. I have focused here and here primarily on whether the corporate social responsibility policy of Volkswagen, in which the company has outlined its commitment to environmental protection, can have legal...

One of the major achievements from European integration is the principle of mutual recognition. ^{(Dutch only)}

On 9 April 2011 a gunman killed 6 people in a shopping mall in the Dutch town of Alphen aan den Rijn. A group of victims now claims damages from the gunman’s parents, claiming that they should have prevented their son from this horrendous act. The claim will fail: on the facts of the case, there is...

How diverse is Dutch science? According to a majority in the Second Chamber, perhaps not quite diverse. Last week, the Chamber adopted a motion that calls upon the government to clarify whether Dutch university staff is made up too much homogeneous. ^{(Dutch only)}

Albert Camus famously wrote that ‘life is the sum of all your choices.’ Private lawyers could not agree more. At the core of private law lies the idea that individuals are allowed to know better than the State.

Almost fifty percent of all marriages in the western world end in divorce. That is one of the most important reasons why relationship therapist Susan Pease Gadoua and reporter Vicki Larson, the authors of the recently published book ‘The New “I Do”’  , argue that a marriage for life is  an...

Do you know Saúl Luciano Lliyua? Saúl is a Peruvian farmer. He lives in the Andes, near a glacier that has been melting rapidly over the last ten years... This blog is only available in Dutch.

Should this symbolic change of French law be applauded?

Prof. Dr. Jan Smits on the David Cameron’s long awaited speech on the future of Europe.

Last week the book based on the 2012 conference was published by Hart Publishing under the title Objectivity in Law and Legal Reasoning.