This is the published version of the first Maastricht Private Law Lecture which was delivered by Reinhard Zimmermann on 27 January 2017. According to a widely held view, the law of succession is shaped by the cultural values of the society within which it prevails. Related to this is the perception that the law of succession is marked by great stability. It is thus resistant both to change and to legal harmonization. Comparative research, too, has traditionally been regarded as impractical an...

Across Europe, restorative justice has gained acceptance as a way of resolving disputes and mitigating the harm of crime in the community. Practitioners have also begun to coordinate restorative meetings in prisons in an e¬ffort to reduce the harms of victimisation and to encourage desistance from crime. This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of Building Bridges, a programme of restorative meetings between victims and prisoners in seven European countries. The authors first describe h...

The absence of the accused in criminal proceedings leading to a conviction causes many legal and practical questions when an European Arrest Warrant is issued to execute such an in absentia judgment. Whereas some Member States see no problem in allowing trials without the accused, other Member States have serious objections to it. These different standards create many problems in practice and necessitate the executing judicial authority to request supplementary information

from the issuing ju...

The book is the extended version of the inaugural lecture given by Professor Petra Bárd on 21 September 2023 on the occasion of her taking up the Chair in Sustainable Rule of Law at the Research Centre for State and Law (SteR) in the Faculty of Law at Radboud University, Nijmegen.

Professor Bárd places the specific manifestation of rule of law deficiencies in the evolution of European criminal justice within a broader constitutional context. She has led the way in reframing the academic and...

Collective actions and the financing of complex mass damage cases have been among the most debated and controversial topics in civil justice in Europe over the past decade. With the entry into force of the Dutch collective damages procedure (WAMCA) in 2020, the Netherlands has re- confirmed its reputation as one of the frontrunners in having a welldeveloped framework for collective actions and settlements. Third party litigation funding has become an important source of funding, and its incre...

In contemporary, late-modern society, security landscapes are being re-sketched. Various traditional and new security providers are part of this evolving scene. The military and the police, who are thought of as 'the old boys in town', are meeting once again. As central components in the power structure of any state, they are heavily involved in this new security design, generating both latent and obvious blurring of boundaries.

The aim of this book is to further explore the blurring boundarie...

This book is the first to set out how sukuk transactions can be structured under Dutch private law and covers the Islamic and Dutch legal issues involved. The author explains the fundamentals of Islamic finance and analyses Islamic contract, property, corporate and finance law. He describes how Islamic finance principles such as riba (in short: prohibition on interest) and gharar (avoidance of contractual uncertainty) have contributed to the development of Islamic finance contracts. The autho...

The title of this book, Fair and Just Solutions?, refers to the norm for the assessment of ownership claims to Nazi-looted art as codified in the so-called Washington Principles in 1998:

If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific...

The Young Property Lawyers Forum is an international network of property law researchers, which has since its inception in 2008 organised seven conferences. Property Law Perspectives V contains a selection of peer reviewed papers presented at the sixth conference of the Young Property Lawyers Forum, which took place at the University of Groningen from 23 to 25 November 2015.

The contributors to this book deal with major challenges facing property law in the 21st century, such as inequality, E...

Wherever you are right now, there’s a good chance that an object in your vicinity is connected to the stories told in this book. The phone in your pocket, the chair you’re sitting on, or the shirt you’re wearing – they likely travelled to you on a large container ship, which burned bunker fuel. Alternatively, petroleum-based substances were likely used in their production, which involved the generation of waste oils. We rarely talk about waste oils or bunker fuel, yet they are essenti...