Following conflict, considerable effort is often dedicated to legislative reform. This effort includes not only domestic actors but also international actors frequently acting with the aim of establishing the rule of law. This article seeks, first, to provide some context for legislative reform in post-conflict settings and outline some of the criticisms that have been made. Drawing on the work of legislative experts, the article then identifies some of the simple questions that those involved in legislative reform ask and discusses some of the key challenges in answering them. The article suggests that establishing the rule of law is more than putting laws ‘on the books’ and that the way in which legislation is created may itself contribute to developing the rule of law. It suggests that as the rule-of-law community develops new approaches, it might find it useful to draw on the approach of legislative experts and their concern with how effective legislation is created.

This article examines the practice and limits of judicial law reform. In particular, I consider the question of when initiation of a reform is appropriate for the judiciary as opposed to the legislature, an issue which has been a matter of controversy amongst the Justices of the United Kingdom Supreme Court. This question is assessed in the light of the institutional and constitutional competences of the courts, particularly with respect to the structure of common law reasoning. It is also argued that it is important to have regard to perspectives of the relevant judges, in understanding the individual and collective approaches to the judicial development of the law.

The Australian law reform arrangements comprise a ‘crowded field’ of law reformers. These include permanent, semi-permanent and ad hoc commissions, committees and inquiries charged with examining and recommending reform of Commonwealth/federal and state laws. These are supplemented by citizen-led deliberative forums on law reform. The author’s experience in her roles as a commissioner and deputy president of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) and also as counsel assigned to advise the Joint Standing Committee on Migration in the Australian Federal Parliament highlighted facets of Australian law reform – the particular role of a law commission working in a federal system and the co-option of legal expertise to scrutinize law reforms proposed within the parliamentary committee system.

The ‘Commission Supérieure de Codification (‘High Commission on Codification’) is a body that was created with the aim of providing support for the process of codifying the texts of positive law. Analysis of both its place in France’s institutional architecture and its working methods highlights certain particularities in the body’s functioning and raises questions as to its degree of proximity to the Law Commissions.

This article sets out the centrality of government to the initiation of law reform in respect of the (England and Wales) Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission (and by extension, those law reform agencies based on the British model), and then considers in the light of recent experience how the existing approach works in the unique context of a single jurisdiction – England and Wales – which now has two governments – the UK Government for England, and the devolved Welsh Government. Having identified shortcomings, the article makes suggestions for improved institutional arrangements to meet the particular law reform needs of Wales.

A provision of Dutch law, according to which employees who lose their jobs upon retirement are excluded from the right to statutory severance compensation, is not in breach of the Framework Directive.

The Finnish Supreme Court has held that an employer discriminated against an employee by not renewing his employment at the end of a fixed-term contract because he was overweight.

In a recent decision, the Labour Court awarded an employee € 7,500 for working in excess of 48 hours a week, contrary to working time legislation. The complainant allegedly regularly checked and responded to emails outside of business hours, occasionally after midnight. The Labour Court reiterated it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that employees are not permitted to work beyond the statutory maximum period and that if an employer is aware that an employee is working excessive hours, must take steps to curtail this.

Periods of service prior to the deadline for transposing Directive 97/81/EC (amended by Directive 98/23/EC) must be taken into account for the purpose of calculating the retirement pension entitlement.

In ‘The Enemy of All Humanity’, David Luban provides an insightful and plausible account of the idea of the hostis generis humani (one that shows that the hostis need not be understood to be an outlaw), and of the distinctive character of the crimes against humanity that the hostis commits. However, I argue in this paper, his suggestion that the hostis is answerable to a moral community of humanity (in whose name the ICC must thus claim to speak) is not tenable. Once we recognize the intimate connection between criminal law and political community, we can see that the hostis should answer to the local, domestic political community in and against which he commits his crimes; and that the proper role of the International Criminal Court, acting in the name of the community of nations, is to provide a second-best substitute for such answering when the local polity cannot or will not hold him to account.

In his contribution to this special issue, David Luban proposes to revive the age-old concept of ‘the enemy of all humanity.’ On his view, this concept supports the aims of international criminal justice by emphasizing that atrocity and persecution crimes are ‘radically evil’ and therefore ‘everyone’s business.’ Criticizing Luban’s proposal, this paper shows that in the past, the ‘enemy of all humanity’ concept has often served to establish parallel systems of justice, depriving these ‘enemies’ of their rights as suspects under criminal law and as lawful combatants under the laws of war. Thus, even if the ‘enemy of all humanity’ concept is used with the intention to bring today’s perpetrators of ‘radical evil’ to justice, it risks undermining, rather than protecting, the rule of law.

Piracy holds a special place within the field of international law because of the universal jurisdiction that applies. This article reconsiders the role of piracy in the development of universal jurisdiction. While usually a connection is established between Cicero’s ‘enemy of all’ and modern conceptions of pirates, it is argued that ‘enemy of the human species’ or ‘enemy of humanity’ is a medieval creation, used by Bartolus, which must be understood in the wake of the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the increased interest for the study of Roman Law. The criminalization of the pirate in the late Middle Ages must be understood not only as a consequence of royal power claiming a monopoly of violence at sea. Both the Italian city-states and the Hanse may have preceded royal power in criminalizing pirates. All the while, political motives in doing so were never absent.

The Danish Supreme Court has upheld the decision from the Danish Eastern High Court (reported in EELC 2017/26) on the implementation of the Working Time Directive to the effect that an ‘intervention act’ can be deemed to be a collective agreement within the meaning of Article 18 of the Working Time Directive.

The Amsterdam Court of First Instance had contemplated asking certain preliminary questions to the ECJ about the EU rights of UK citizens residing outside the UK (see EELC 2018/18), but the Court of Appeal has now refused this, considering the underlying claims to be too vague.

The purpose of this article is to examine restorative approaches to campus sexual harm. A restorative response may provide support and validation for survivors, a pathway for personal change for those who cause sexual harm, and assist in changing campus culture. The article addresses three significant challenges to developing a restorative response. The first challenge is the influence of a pervasive ideology that I refer to as crime logic. A second challenge is the need for an intersectional response that addresses the potential for bias in decisions by campus administrators and restorative justice practitioners. The third challenge is to develop restorative approaches for circumstances in which a victim/perpetrator dyad is not appropriate.

Studies have shown that the effects of scientific research on law and policy making are often fairly limited. Different reasons can be given for this: scientists are better at falsifying hypothesis than at predicting the future, the outcomes of academic research and empirical evidence can be inconclusive or even contradictory, the timing of the legislative cycle and the production of research show mismatches, there can be clashes between the political rationality and the economic or scientific rationality in the law making process et cetera. There is one ‘wicked’ methodological problem, though, that affects all regulatory policy making, namely: the ‘jump’ from empirical facts (e.g. there are too few organ donors in the Netherlands and the voluntary registration system is not working) to normative recommendations of what the law should regulate (e.g. we need to change the default rule so that everybody in principle becomes an organ donor unless one opts out). We are interested in how this translation process takes place and whether it could make a difference if the empirical research on which legislative drafts are build is more quantitative type of research or more qualitative. That is why we have selected two cases in which either type of research played a role during the drafting phase. We use the lens of the proportionality principle in order to see how empirical data and scientific evidence are used by legislative drafters to justify normative choices in the design of new laws.

In 2008, the European Union was hit by the most severe financial downturn since the Great Recession of the 1930s. One of the major consequences of this phenomenon was the deterioration in the enjoyment of human rights, in particular economic and social rights. While it is indisputable that the crisis itself was directly correlated to the erosion of such rights, the conditions attached to the loan agreements between defaulting countries and the three lending institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank and the European Commission, have negatively affected the rights under consideration. Loans came with strict austerity measures, such as public expenditure cuts in the realm of, inter alia, public services, benefits and social security. This article considers the deterioration in the enjoyment of economic and social rights by Union inhabitants and particularly the anti-crisis strategy adopted by the European Union, which, as will be demonstrated, directly contributed to this deterioration. The stance of the three institutions was facilitated by the less than proactive, but improving, positioning of the Court of Justice of the European Union in case law, which will be assessed. It must be noted that it is not the three institutions acting alone in this process; the Member States are the ones who agree to the loans and their conditions and implement austerity measures on the ground. However, as will be reflected, the practical role and actual input of the countries themselves in this procedure is limited. The central theoretical tenet of the article is that the European Union is re-shifting its direction to the almost absolute adoption of an economic constitution, with little regard to its social counterpart. Within the aforementioned framework, this article seeks to assess the status of economic and social rights in a crisis-hit Union, provide a theoretical explanation for this occurrence and put forth possibilities for positive change, placing the protection and promotion of economic and social rights at the heart of any responses to crisis as a method to ensure their sustainable protection effectively.

The hypothesis of this article is that plain language drafting with innovative drafting techniques can improve the quality of legislation. Further to this, the article tries to prove that quality legislation can also make the law more accessible to its general audience. With regard to quality, the article assesses plain language drafting with innovative drafting techniques using Helen Xanthaki’s criteria of quality in legislation, i.e. that it should be clear, precise and unambiguous. With regard to accessibility, it is defined broadly as to include readability. I will first assess whether plain language drafting with innovative drafting techniques can meet the expectations of its general audience and second discuss whether legislation drafted in plain language with innovative techniques passes the usability tests.