Situating the Individual within Climate Law:A behavioural law and economics approach to end-user emissions trading

Dit proefschrift analyseert de wenselijkheid van End-user Emissions Trading (EET), emissiehandel voor eindgebruikers, om klimaatverandering te bestrijden binnen het juridische raamwerk van de Europese Unie. Vooral de vraagstukken van publieke responsiviteit, politieke acceptatie en de werking van zo’n aanvullend beleidsmechanisme om koolstofemissies te reduceren binnen het Europese reguleringskader worden daarbij bestudeerd. Met betrekking tot publieke responsiviteit onderzoekt dit proefschrift het potentieel van Behavioural Law and Economics (BLE), de gedragseconomische bestudering van het recht, om de wisselwerking te begrijpen tussen prikkels en motivatie en om te beoordelen of individuen dan wel huishoudens in staat zijn om effectief te reageren op een systeem van koolstofemissiehandel. De axiologische en methodologische basis van BLE wordt onderzocht om het nut ervan te beoordelen. Het proefschrift beschrijft tevens een nieuwe experimentele studie alsmede de conclusies die daaruit kunnen worden getrokken voor het ontwerp van klimaatbeleid. Vervolgens wordt gekeken naar het potentieel van BLE om politieke acceptatie beter te kunnen begrijpen en wordt het concept van discursive capture ontwikkeld om de mogelijkheid van irrationele reguleringsbeslissingen aan te tonen. Met betrekking tot het reguleringskader wordt een theoretisch begrip verschaft van de ‘eindgebruiker’ als juridische categorie, waarbij wordt beargumenteerd dat de eindgebruiker geen individu of huishouden hoeft te zijn, maar vooraleer de meest-bevoordeelde agent en de laagste-kostenvermijder. Met behulp van subsidiariteit en proportionaliteit als analytische handvatten om de rol van de Europese Unie te bestuderen, toont dit proefschrift aan dat klimaatregulering zich richt op de toedeling van aansprakelijkheid aan industriële actoren en op hun mogelijkheid als georganiseerde economische actoren om te reageren op externe economische prikkels. Gezien de moeilijkheid om individuen en huishoudens als gelijkwaardig te beschouwen, de aanwezigheid van onderhandelingskosten en de kosten van het handhaven van een dergelijk schema, wordt ten slotte betoogd dat het raadzaam zou zijn om bedrijven verantwoordelijk te maken voor het reduceren van emissies die toe te schrijven zijn aan huishoudens

Agency as responsiveness

In this article I seek to de-tether the idea of agency from the epistemic pursuits of philosophers and legal scholars working on adaptive preferences and moral responsibility. What is common to such scholars is a move away from conceptualising agency as individual acts of conscious deliberation. While I support a shift in the way agency is understood, I do not find in their work an account of locating and promoting agency as a primary good. For instance, while findings from various psychological sciences are endorsed for their objective findings on individuals, there is little guidance on what such findings mean for how people negotiate social spaces. As a first step, I suggest that an appropriate paradigm for agency would be responsiveness rather than adherence to responsibility. I then proceed to identify properties of a responsiveness paradigm, concentrating on transpositional deliberation, mediation and intelligibility

Privileging (some forms of) interdisciplinarity and interpretation : methods in comparative law

How should comparative law scholars engage with other disciplines? Which social sciences are relevant for the purpose of comparison? Such questions are important for the process of comparison, as disciplinary self-regulation (and interaction between disciplines) is not a neutral and objective process, and is always informed by embedded political, ideological, ethical preferences. Or, the act of selecting ways of reading, thinking and writing in the service of any task requires the explicit or implicit endorsement of epistemic and hermeneutic authority. In this essay, I review three recent volumes on comparative law – a companion volume, a book of practice-oriented reflections by scholars who engage in comparative legal scholarship, and a region-specific contribution on Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia. The approaches adopted in the volumes – concentrating on the science of comparative law, finding a middle way between too much complexity and too little, concentrating on region-specific complexities – do not address the issue of negotiating epistemic and hermeneutic authority posed above. Such negotiation may be facilitated by concentrating on what I suggest is the organising principle of the discipline of comparative law: identifying the construction, perpetuation and functionality of the internal authority of law

Justice as Europe's Signifier

Drawing on the fact that justice is never explained in European legal discourse, but is used in conjunction with other principles and institutional decisions, this contribution argues that justice is used as a rhetorical tool to provide legitimacy to such principles and decisions. An analogous process is at work in scholarly critique of institutional justice, where the way justice is understood is made subservient to scholarly preferences for other principles. This process is most notably at work in making justice subservient to particular ways of understanding and advocating the importance of democracy and fair process. Assuming that it is desirable for justice to have a voice of its own, the chapter argues that it is necessary to identify and work against the ‘inverse monism’ that justice suffers; where institutional speech-acts shape the discourse of social organisation and individual contestation.The inevitability of defining justice according to institutional preferences tempts the conclusion that justice cannot possibly have a voice of its own within the institutional constrains of the European legal order. This may be true if the aim is to give space to all the meanings that justice can possibly have, but the chapter recognises the necessity for institutional violence upon infinite meanings to maintain social order. What is advocated instead is working towards the construction of a legal space that facilitates the assessment and contestation of institutional violence. Such a legal space may require institutional change as well as interpretive ingenuity. The interpretive techniques found in some of the case law on citizenship demonstrate that it is possible for a citizen to seek justice understood in ways that are different from maintaining the stability of the common market. However, other cases with respect to citizenship and other areas of law serve to foreclose this endeavour