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Law and Method


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Article

Access_open Naar een gedragseconomie van het recht

Keywords behavioural law and economics, law and economics, experimental approach, incentive compatibility
Authors Marin Coerts, Berber Laarman, Jacobien Rutgers e.a.
AbstractAuthor's information

    Behavioral economics builds on insights from behavioural sciences, primarily psychology, and aims to explain the behaviour of (groups of) individuals under conditions of scarcity. It applies an empirical methodology grounded in econometrics and based on experimental research. The authors’ proposition is that behavioural law and economics rooted in experiments is a valuable approach to legal studies that complements pre-existing law and economics. Experiments maximise the opportunity to identify causal links and norms as building blocks of the law as interventions in human behaviour, and hence are well suited in the context of empirical legal studies. The research design menu includes variables such as hypothetical decisions versus actual behaviour, experiments with or without full randomisation, pure or quasi, lab versus field, and natural experiments versus experiments that can be manipulated. Behavioural economics operates under conditions of incentive compatibility and the no-deception principle. In this article, the authors set out a research agenda for behavioural law and economics research, covering private law (consumer and contract law as well as liability and tort law), administrative law, and economic law.


Marin Coerts
Mr. Marin Coerts is PhD candidate, Faculty of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Berber Laarman
Mr. dr. Berber Laarman is Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Jacobien Rutgers
Prof. mr. dr. Jacobien Rutgers Professor of private law, Faculty of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Wolf Sauter
Prof. mr. dr. drs. Wolf Sauter is Professor law markets and behavior, Faculty of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and expert at the Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM), The Hague, The Netherlands.

Arjen van Witteloostuijn
Prof. dr. Arjen van Witteloostuijn is Dean of the School of Business and Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Professor at the Antwerp Management School, Antwerp, Belgium.
Article

Access_open Critical Thinking in Academic Legal Education

A Liberal Conception

Keywords critical thinking, academic legal education, legal skills training, social engagement
Authors Bart van Klink
AbstractAuthor's information

    Critical thinking is generally considered to be one of the central goals – if not the ultimate goal – of education. Critical thinking, as part of liberal learning, is done primarily for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of thinking against the grain, exploring new ideas and thereby contributing to the development of scientific knowledge. The liberal conception of critical thinking is under threat, since education is nowadays turned into some form of social engagement. Increasingly, academic education is conceived in instrumental terms as a means to achieve some non-academic end: to create responsible ‘academic citizens’, who are committed to the values of diversity and inclusion and who are engaged in solving contemporary social problems. Against this tendency, this article defends a liberal conception of critical thinking in academic legal education and addresses three questions: (i) what is critical thinking? (ii) why do we need critical thinking? and (iii) how can we, as teachers, promote critical thinking in our students? Finally, it raises the question of whether a liberal conception of critical thinking rules out any kind of social engagement as pursued by universities in the present day.


Bart van Klink
Bart van Klink is Professor of Legal Methodology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Article

Access_open Progress in Migration and Asylum Law scholarship – International, Intersectional, and Interdisciplinary

Special Issue Progress in Legal Scholarship, Marnix Snel, Sanne Taekema & Gijs van Dijck (eds.)

Keywords migration and asylum law, legal scholarship, multilevel governance intersectionality
Authors Mariana Gkliati, Tesseltje de Lange and Sandra Mantu
AbstractAuthor's information

    Migration and asylum are global phenomena. Yet they lack a universally accepted and applicable legal regulatory framework, which leads to fragmentation across different levels and fields of analysis. In this contribution, we focus on migration and asylum law (MAL) which we understand to be made up of national, regional and international laws as well as their implementation in practice. The aim of this article is to identify developments in the area of MAL and the scholarly voices that have contributed to ground-breaking legal scholarship. We approach the question of progress in MAL scholarship based on our combined expertise in human rights, refugee law and migration law and bring forward how, in these often-separate legal fields, similar progress has been made. We focus our discussion on three interactions that we consider to have changed the way in which legal scholarship addresses migration and asylum: interactions between national and other sources of law; interactions between different fields of law, crossing into human rights law, family law or labour law; and interactions with various empirical scholarships (section 3). Learning from sociology and anthropology scholarships, the intersection of social stratifications such as gender, race and ethnicity, and class is now firmly grounded in MAL scholarship, inspiring the methodological shift from black letter law to empirical legal studies.


Mariana Gkliati
Mariana Gkliati is Assistant Professor of Migration and Asylum Law, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Tesseltje de Lange
Tesseltje de Lange is Professor of European Migration Law, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Sandra Mantu
Sandra Mantu is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Law and Migration Law, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Article

Access_open Progress in Legal Methodology – A Methodological Assessment of Six PhD Theses

Special Issue Progress in Legal Scholarship, Marnix Snel, Sanne Taekema & Gijs van Dijck (eds.)

Keywords legal methodology, legal scholarship, methodological justification, normative framework
Authors Sanne Taekema and Bart van Klink
AbstractAuthor's information

    In this article, the question is raised to what extent the methodology debate in legal scholarship has improved the practice by PhD researchers of justifying their methodology. Over the past twenty years, there has been much more consideration and discussion of legal methods, especially in Dutch academia. Taking this Dutch debate as a starting point, Taekema and Van Klink argue that it has led to a normative framework with which the methodology of legal research can be assessed. Formulating a set of topics and questions that form the core of this framework, they apply it to a set of six fairly recent PhD dissertations. Building on these cases, they observe that some progress is made from a methodological point of view, compared with the situation described by Tijssen in his PhD thesis from 2006. Taekema and Van Klink conclude, however, that the methodology debate appears not to have led to a significantly better practice of methodological justification, at least not yet on all assessment criteria. The normative framework of a dissertation, for instance, still deserves attention.


Sanne Taekema
Sanne Taekema is Professor of Legal Theory, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Bart van Klink
Bart van Klink is Professor of Legal Methodology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.