Netherlands and Flanders

History

As in Great Britain and the United States, the roots of modern social-scientific interest in law lie in legal scholarship. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a few Dutch academic lawyers proclaimed the view that legal scholarship should be founded in sociological knowledge. With a few exceptions, these programmatic statements did not lead to significant empirical research, nor did they have a notable effect on legal scholarship.

The first real breakthrough in both respects was the so-called adat law school, which grew up around Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874–1933). The central objectives of this group of scholars were to record the local customary law of the various groups of the Indonesian population to make it available for purposes of the administration of justice and to buttress their argument that Dutch law should not be thoughtlessly imposed on the different circumstances of colonial Indonesia. The body of work produced by the scholars of the adat law school is in quality and scope equivalent to the early Anglo-American tradition in anthropology of law.

After World War II and the independence of Indonesia, for many years adat law research was impracticable, and ceased to appear relevant to Dutch legal scholars; institutionalized attention to anthropology of law largely ceased. Scholars have chiefly forgotten most of the work done, although several publications and some of the fundamental theoretical ideas of the adat law school have been taken up in the mainstream of the international literature.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the intellectual turmoil characteristic of universities everywhere in the West led, among other things, to a resurgence of interest in the social aspects of law. In 1962, the Social Science Council of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, influenced by the views of several lawyers who had become interested in a more empirical approach to legal scholarship, recommended that every faculty of law should include a professorship in sociology of law.

Institutionalization

In the 1970s and 1980s, sociology of law became institutionalized in all nine Dutch law faculties, with professorships, staff, a distinctive research program, and a place in the curriculum. During the 1990s, there was [Page 1061]some retrenchment, and currently, although sociology of law is present in all faculties, several faculties no longer have professorships. Although sociology of law had already acquired a place in the law curriculum in Flanders in the 1960s, further institutionalization has been weaker, largely due to the shortage of research funding; nevertheless, important empirical work has been carried out, especially in Louvain and Antwerp.

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