Reading Time: 7 minutes When it comes to living within our planetary boundaries, land use is incredibly important. Not only do industry and agriculture significantly contribute to climate change, also construction of homes and the way in which these homes are used have negative effects on our climate. Our legal system plays an important role in our transition to a more sustainable society. Our social imaginary, the social grounding for our world view and our ideology, gives direction to how we structure our society. A large part of this structuring happens through state-made law, both public ..read more

Reading Time: 7 minutes According to a recent study for the European Parliament, academic freedom in the Netherlands is under pressure. The report, which drew some attention in the Dutch debate, identifies three main sources of pressure: “developments in the system level and intra-institutional science governance modes, structures and practices, developments in society leading to more intense impacts on scientists in the form of threats and harassment, the emergence of a ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeness’ inside the academic community, and trends in research funding, including the growing impact ..read more

Reading Time: 6 minutes Can Shell claim to be the Netherlands’ largest investor in green energy in its advertisements? At the start of this month a new Code on Sustainability Advertisement was adopted by the Dutch Advertising Code Committee (Stichting Reclame Code Comissie) – the self-regulation body that deals with rules on advertisements in the Netherlands. Over the past years, more and more cases on misleading environmental claims have come to the Committee, with big polluters like Shell and KLM being successfully urged to stop misleading campaigns. The new, updated rules follow the Dutch ..read more

Reading Time: 9 minutes This blog was featured earlier on the N-EXTLAW project website Since first bursting on the scene in Italy in the late 1980s, the notion of the ‘social enterprise’ has spread to nearly every corner of the globe. In recent years, many jurisdictions have accommodated and stimulated this expansion by introducing legal frameworks for social enterprises. From the United States to Denmark and from South Korea to France, countries are increasingly choosing to recognise social enterprises in their legal systems. One country that has conspicuously lagged behind others in this r ..read more

Reading Time: 7 minutes Introduction Algorithm-enabled “personalisation” is a hot topic in legal scholarship. In recent times, “personalised law” has been the subject of books (like this and this), a conference culminating in a high-level online symposium and numerous events. As someone who stays largely out of digitalisation debates, I was impressed to discover the debate that has already flourished in European Private Law. At the same time, when reflecting on the link between personalisation and a subject I am versed in, namely standard terms in consumer contracts, my scepticism ultimately ..read more

Reading Time: 6 minutes Since the 2015 Paris Agreement recognised the role of capital flows in climate change mitigation, EU regulations have sought to harness finance to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. New laws inter alia created a common framework for defining sustainable activities (“Green Taxonomy”) and introduced dedicated treatment of ESG (environment, social, governance) issues qua risks. In this context, physical and transition risks are two channels used by regulators to make banks “see” climate change issues. The latter risk type is puzzlingly broad and encompasses all societal ..read more

Reading Time: 7 minutes The dispute settlement mechanism of the Energy Charter Treaty (‘ECT’) has been proving to be an obstacle for States in their quest to meet climate obligations. The ECT aims to ensure the protection of investments and in turn investors. Any measure implemented by a State that can causes a negative effect to these investments can be subjected to litigation. Often the measures that States implement are in relation to combating climate which in turn changes the environment of the investment – usually in a preventative manner and thus bearing a negative effect. Therefore, w ..read more

Reading Time: 5 minutes “Politics plays out within markets and not outside of them,” Callon reminds us, “because markets produce the social, rather than undoing it.” Fair trade is a project that makes this insight especially explicit: it aims to produce alternative social orders by creating forms of market exchange in which consumers and intermediaries care about the needs of producers and an equitable division of surplus. In a forthcoming paper, we use the example of fair trade to explore what we call a neoliberal mode of constituting and governing the social, in a moment after the disintegr ..read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes The work of turning ‘the economy’; ‘the political’ and ‘global law’ from a priori concepts into questions is a critical one for our time, as these forms have come to dominate so much of how everyday activities are framed and valued in communities around the world. By way of cursory background, ‘economy’ comes from the Greek, oikonomia, meaning ‘household management’. With the rise of the nation-state model, this – particularly in the form of ‘political economy’ was used from the 18th century onwards to refer to the management of state wealth. From the late 19th through ..read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Who defines economy and value in international law? Who is left out? And what are the implications for social and environmental justice? A useful starting point may be to acknowledge that people value different things. In terms of what should constitute ‘the economy’, people count different things and do so in diverse ways for varying reasons. As scholars from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement have shown, international law has difficulty reflecting this multiplicity given its history as a conduit for Eurocentric values writ large. Interna ..read more