3 ms·

skrebbel said that being taken into consideration and being more important doesn't mean 'became legal'. take a look for a map of legal systems with English lin

• fmw 16y ago
  Skrebbel is right and wrong at the same time. It is true that court rulings do not define new legislation in the Dutch legal system[0], but he's wrong when he says judges don't consider court rulings. Especially rulings from higher courts (e.g. the "Hoge Raad", which literally means "High Council" and is our version of the Supreme Court, or European ECHR and ECJ) are important sources when interpreting the law. So there are some factual issues with what Skrebbel is saying, but the spirit of his post (that court rulings aren't as important as they are in Common Law systems) is correct, especially considering the fact that this is a ruling from a lower court. Here is a quick translation of the relevant part of the Wikipedia article JCB_K linked: Jurisprudence is a source of law in the Netherlands. Precedents created by Dutch jurisprudence are less strict than those from rulings from courts in the United Kingdom [and other Common Law system like the United States]. An example of the relevance of jurisprudence is the interpretation of legal terms that can be explained differently depending on your perspective. E.g. terms like "reasonable", "reasonable timeframe" and "carefully" [note that these terms are a bit hard to translate. I seem to have forgotten their exact counterparts in US legal lingo, but you get the gist of it]. Judges have the role of interpreting the meaning of terms like that when there is some ambiguity in the particular context. Judges don't just make something up when interpreting the law: they use interpretation methods and methods of reasoning. Interpretation methods: 1: grammatical, 2: legal history [e.g. looking at the logs from the parliament when discussing the law as it was proposed to figure out their reasoning] 3: systematic [in the context of the system of the law], 4: teleological [i.e. looking at the goal of the law]. Methods of reasoning: 1: A contrario: things that aren't mentioned specifically in the law are excluded. E.g. a law that is only [and specifically] about employment contracts, in which case freelance contracts are excluded. 2: analogy [note: analogical interpretation is disallowed in criminal law, which isn't mentioned by the Wikipedia article, due to article 1 of the Dutch penal code: "No fact is punishable other than from a preexisting written law" (loosely translated with "written" added for clarity). IANAL, but from what I remember from my short stint in law school (I actually completed the courses relevant to this issue ;), the Wikipedia article is reasonably correct although some of the wordings are a bit unfortunate. As to the matter at hand in the article being discussed here: I don't think I can say anything meaningful about it without actually seeing the exact text of the court ruling, because discussing it based on a article by a foreign journalist who may or may not have understood the legal implications correctly seems a bit precarious. [0]: At least generally, there may be exceptions e.g. rulings of European courts that tend to have a little more maneuverability, but still derive their judgements from things like the ECHR.