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This contribution examines two questions concerning the role of case law in the legal curriculum, in particular in civil law jurisdictions such as Indonesia and the Netherlands. The first question is why case law should be part of legal education. It is argued this is not only because cases decided upon by the highest courts are recognized as an ‘official’ source of law, but also because it is impossible to properly understand a legal rule – designed to be applied to real-life situations – without studying those situations. Case law shows how rules can be balanced against each other; learning how to do this requires the careful and critical analysis of key cases in any field of the law. The second question is how to incorporate cases within the curriculum. The teaching philosophy of ‘active learning’ allows for various methods. Next to the ‘case method’ and ‘case study method,’ special attention is paid to how case law can be used in a setting of ‘problem-based learning’ (PBL). It is shown how PBL allows us to use cases in instructing students to analyse judicial cases, to solve legal problems and to critically assess the outcome a court reaches.

This article aims at gaining deeper insights into the environmental liability of companies in the European Union. It analyses the role of companies within the Environmental Liability Directive (ELD) and evaluates potential hurdles that may limit the possibility to hold companies liable for environmental harm. Various remedies to the limited liability of the corporation are discussed, and the suggestions are formulated to improve access to justice for victims of environmental harm. Specific attention is paid to a balanced regime of mandatory solvency guarantees to support the ELD liabilities of companies.

Large-scale dark web marketplaces have been around for more than a decade. So far, academic research has mainly focused on drug and hacking-related offers. However, data markets remain understudied, especially given their volatile nature and distinct characteristics based on shifting iterations. In this paper, we perform a large-scale study on dark web data markets. We first characterize data markets by using an innovative theoretical legal taxonomy based on the Council of Europe’s Cybercrime Convention and its implementation in Dutch law. The recent Covid-19 pandemic showed that cybercrime has become more prevalent with the increase of digitalization in society. In this context, important questions arise regarding how cybercrime harms are determined, measured, and prioritized. We propose a determination of harm based on criminal law qualifications and sanctions. We also address the empirical question of what the economic activity on data markets looks like nowadays by performing a comprehensive measurement of digital goods based on an original dataset scraped from twelve marketplaces consisting of approximately 28,000 offers from 642 vendors. The resulting analysis combines insights from the theoretical legal framework and the results of the measurement study. To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine these two elements systematically.

The work presented in this Chapter was designed for the purposes of a specific European project, named “CrossJustice” (hereinafter cj). The first part of the Chapter focuses on the modelling of definitions within the six procedural European Union Directives, which were the focus of the research project. The goal is that of illustrating the steps and the challenges towards the construction of a lightweight ontology representing this information. The process of building the ontology revealed a number of aspects that present opportunities for further research. In the second part, an automatic experimentation concerning the harmonization of EU directives is presented, built on top of an automatic analysis of national implementations for each pair of states to investigate the similarity of the corresponding texts. The applied text mining and natural language processing techniques then culminate in the computation of the cosine similarity between vectors associated with legal texts. On that basis, an aggregated index approximates the degree of harmonization within the six EU Directives.

he EU Small Claims Procedure (henceforth: ESCP) has been implemented in the Netherlands by a separate statute, that entered into force on 10 June 2009. This Dutch Small Claims Act (henceforth: SCA) has been amended in 2017 as a result of the changes in the ESCP of 2017. About the initial implementation of the SCA has been reported in 2013. This contribution will focus on the situation since the amendments of 2017, obviously taking into account earlier developments that still determine the workings of the ESCP. First, the framework of civil litigation in the Netherlands will be described. Second, the implementation of the ESCP will be discussed and explained. The main part will be devoted to the workings of the ESCP in practice, including an analysis of the way the ESCP is used (and maybe abused). The conclusion will be that in less than 3 % of the cases the ESCP is used in conformity with its objectives, but that legal practice profits from its aspects that help to avoid the workings of other European instruments, especially the EU Service Regulation.

El paradigma liberal de la propiedad encontró acogida en el Código Civil argentino de 1871. El presente estudio ofrece, en primer lugar, dos conceptualizaciones que apuntan a delimitar su alance: paradigmas de propiedad y jurisdicciones civiles de América. El presente estudio luego se aboca a la primera generación de códigos civiles en esas jurisdicciones de las Américas, elaborando sobre el momento de adopción, el contenido y la motivación. El derrotero de temas continúa con un rastreo de la codificación del paradigma liberal de la propiedad en esos cuerpos normativos decimonónicos. A continuación, el presente estudio ofrece un ejemplo de la mentada circulación de ideas, describiendo la experiencia de recepción del paradigma liberal en los artículos y las notas al texto elaborado por Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield y su polinización en los códigos civiles de otras jurisdicciones. Debe notarse que la propiedad es pasible de cambios como resultado de la mentalidad de una sociedad determinada, conforme a un tiempo y lugar.

In dit artikel betogen de auteurs dat het dogma waarin het strafrecht en (in mindere mate) het civiel recht als vangnet fungeren bij de bescherming van de fysieke leefomgeving verlaten moet worden. Het nadeel van dat systeem is namelijk dat ook bij grove gevallen van milieuverstoring, zelfs met concreet gevaar voor de menselijke gezondheid als gevolg, rechtsbescherming onder druk staat. Bepleit wordt om meer in te zetten op de autonomie van het privaat- en strafrecht, waardoor het mogelijk wordt in gevallen van ernstige milieuvervuiling publieke regulering aan te vullen en in sommige gevallen zelfs te ‘overrulen’. Dat pleidooi heeft de nodige implicaties voor de aansprakelijkheidsrechtelijke en strafrechtelijke beoordeling en leidt tot verscheidene vervolgvragen en uitdagingen.

Summary During the Second World War Germany and German nationals looted the Netherlands and its nationals of many valuable assets, that were taken to Germany. Often the looting took the form of forced sales. In some cases, the sales price was too low, in other cases the German buyer paid market value or more, but often the buyer paid with guilders looted from the Dutch State. After the liberation of the Netherlands the ‘restoration of rights regime’ enabled victims of forced sales to seek annulment of the sales. This article concentrates on those movable goods that were sold to German buyers and that, after the war, returned from Germany to the Netherlands with the help of the Allied Forces, the so-called recuperation goods. If the seller did not seek annulment before the deadline of July 1951, for example because the price paid was considerable so that he preferred to keep the purchase price, or if his request was rejected, the Dutch State should not be forced to return these goods to their German buyer. Therefore, these goods were first subjected to Royal Decree E 133 which expropriated all German owned property in the Netherlands. Upon return to the Netherlands the recuperation goods became State property, but this measure could be undone by the seller successfully seeking annulment of the sales contract under Royal Decree E 100. However, if no annulment took place, the State remained owner of these goods.

This contribution explores the application of data science and artificial intelligence to legal research, more specifically an element that has not received much attention: the research infrastructure required to make such analysis possible. In recent years, EU law has become increasingly digitised and published in online databases such as EUR-Lex and HUDOC. However, the main barrier inhibiting legal scholars from analysing this information is lack of training in data analytics. Legal analytics software can mitigate this problem to an extent. However, current systems are dominated by the commercial sector. In addition, most systems focus on search of legal information but do not facilitate advanced visualisation and analytics. Finally, free to use systems that do provide such features are either too complex to use for general legal scholars, or are not rich enough in their analytics tools. In this paper, we motivate the case for building a software platform that addresses these limitations. Such software can provide a powerful platform for visualising and exploring connections and correlations in EU case law, helping to unravel the “DNA” behind EU legal systems. It will also serve to train researchers and students in schools and universities to analyse legal information using state-of-the-art methods in data science, without requiring technical proficiency in the underlying methods. We also suggest that the software should be powered by a data infrastructure and management paradigm following the seminal FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles.

Two English and two Dutch cases have recently clarified the (potential) liability of parent companies vis-à-vis third parties in relation to damage caused by their subsidiaries. They concern the decisions of the UK Supreme Court in Vedanta v Lungowe and Okpabi v Shell, the Hague Court of Appeal in Oguru v Shell and the Hague District Court in Milieudefensie v Shell (climate change case).