On Tuesday 18 November, Karin van Leeuwen was a guest at RICH research group The Eighties: Austerity, Reform, Conflict. Van Leeuwen, assistant professor of European political history at Maastricht University, spoke about the juridification of Dutch politics in the 1980s. During this period, there were several occasions when the courts intervened in political discussions, for instance in 1984 during the trial concerning the deployment of cruise missiles, or in 1985 during the conflict surrounding the breadwinner principle. In her presentation, Karin focused in particular on the case of immigration policy.
Van Leeuwen demonstrated that the practice of juridification was multi-layered: it involved the direct influence of judicial actors (judges and lawyers) on policy, but also indirect influence. Considering citizens and interest groups increasingly turned to the courts from the 1970s onwards to force politicians to make certain choices, legislators began to take this into account in new policies.
Van Leeuwen furthermore noted that ‘juridification’ is often contrasted with ‘democracy’ in societal and historical discussions: the influence of lawyers and judges is supposed to be at odds with what constitutes true democracy. Van Leeuwen argued that these discussions should be included in research and that it should be studied how contemporaries linked practices of juridification to ideas about Dutch parliamentary democracy.
Afterwards, Rowin Jansen, assistant professor of national security law at Radboud University, gave a response. He discussed the difference between how historians view democracy and how lawyers view it. He also touched on the issue of deregulation, which was a major topic in both the 1980s and 1990s and remains so today. How did the courts deal with social pressure to scrap regulations?