Folk Concepts and the Effective Regulation of New Technologies

One argument that is at times adduced against proposals for legal change, such as granting personhood to autonomous agents, is that the change in question will be inefficacious if it takes the law too far from the folk world of people. By contrast, in this article we argue that legal concepts and folk concepts are more malleable than we tend to assume. We turn to (legal) history to demonstrate that the relationship between legal concepts and folk concepts is not one-directional, which means that changes in the law can and have influenced folk psychology as well as vice versa. This has implications for debates around the regulation of new technologies: the ‘lack of efficacy’ argument is not a strong one and mere reference to current folk concepts cannot suffice in such debates. Moreover, the efficacy argument does not, and cannot, replace normative arguments in this respect, so the malleability of folk concepts needs to be considered by legal decision-makers. Current conceptual apparatuses (legal or folk) are not immutable, and reification of the current status quo should not be presupposed

The influence of National Socialism on divorce law in Austria and the Netherlands

This article provides a comparative overview of the influences of National Socialism on divorce law in Austria and the Netherlands between 1938 (Austria)/1940 (the Netherlands) and 1945. One of the primary goals of National Socialism was the establishment of a racially 'pure' Volksgemeinschaft. To that end, marriages that, for whatever reason, were no longer productive, or which would lead to the mingling of Aryan blood and racially 'inferior' blood should be dissolved. Therefore the National Socialists substantially revised German divorce law, which was introduced in Austria in 1938 as well. This 1938 Marriage Law, albeit substantially altered and denazified, still serves as the basis of Austrian marriage and divorce law. In the Netherlands, regarded as much a brother nation to Germany as Austria was, attempts were made during the occupation to revise Dutch divorce law, partly because it was generally believed that the grounds for divorce had to be widened somewhat, partly to attune Dutch divorce law to National Socialism. However, these revisions were never enacted

Recht in een multiculturele samenleving

De Belgische en de Nederlandse samenleving zijn in toenemende mate multiculturele samenlevingen. Dit zorgt voor een dynamiek die het denken over de betekenis van bestaande en nieuwe normen en waarden binnen een samenleving beïnvloedt. Het roept de vraag op of, en zo ja, in hoeverre en hoe deze nieuwe diversiteit in het geldende recht haar weerslag moet krijgen. Dit boek beschrijft het Belgische, en vaak ook het Nederlandse recht dat van toepassing is op heel wat thema’s die in de huidige multiculturele samenleving relevant zijn: vrijheid van meningsuiting, vrijheid van godsdienst, religieuze echtscheidingen, de hoofddoek of andere religieuze tekens op de werkvloer, eerwraak, etnische profilering en vele zaken meer. Het besteedt aandacht aan actuele maatschappelijke discussies, dilemma’s en ontwikkelingen

Liber Promotorum Gerard-René de Groot

This book provides an overview of the academic genealogy of Professor Gerard-René de Groot