The quest for implementation: a conversation with David Barrett

In recent years, indications emerged that the assumption of self-efficacy in the Dutch Legal Aid Law might have been an impediment for accessing subsidised legal aid for citizens who suffered from the childcare benefits situation. The temporary Arrangement Advice Certificate Self-efficacy envisages to fix this potential flaw. Jin Ho Verdonschot, together with his colleagues Carla van Rooijen, Susanne Peters and Corry van Zeeland,  shows how insights in the people using the arrangement, their legal problems and situations, the nature and effectiveness of interventions under the arrangement, and the experiences of people and the professionals helping them, can inform changes in policy.

The elimination and the regulation of informal payments in the state-funded health care sector is an on-going policy fiasco in the post-socialist Hungary. Fanni Gyurko analysed patients’ and doctors’ perceptions regarding the state regulation of ‘thank-you-money’ and she also inquired what these actors actually perceive as ‘law’. She concluded that although the elimination of the informal payments by using either forbidding or encouraging formal interventions is difficult, greater transparency throughout the healthcare sector would eliminate some of the coercive factors that patients are faced with in relation to the doctors.

In England and Wales, the implementation of equality and human rights norms has been lacking. Through semi-structured interviews, David Barrett explores the legal consciousness of individuals responsible for the implementation of these norms in regulators, inspectorates and ombuds. Through this work it is possible to see different types of legal consciousness and how legal consciousness influences implementation.

In the Netherlands, social security organizations employ algorithmic profiling technologies to combat fraud, but the use of these tools poses risks of algorithmic discrimination. This episode explores how the use of algorithmic profiling technologies can lead to discriminatory outcomes that clash with the right to non-discrimination. Drawing on expert interviews and the Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal, Lucas Michael Haitsma discusses how unmitigated risks of discrimination interact to produce discriminatory outcomes and emphasize the crucial need for a lifecycle approach in identifying and mitigating risks of algorithmic discrimination.

How to shift blame for the childcare benefits affair? In the aftermath of the childcare benefits affair, elected officials, parliamentarians, public officials and the judiciary engaged in blame games to deal with, shift, and minimize their own role in the affair. In this podcast, Koen Migchelbrink provides a reconstruction of the childcare benefits affair and analyzes how politicians, administrators and the judiciary played the blame game based on the paper he wrote with Sandra van Thiel.

In recent years, there have been multiple 'system failures' in the domain of automated social security enforcement across welfare states. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal is an especially alarming example, among other reasons because of the scope of systemic weaknesses in the rule of law system (Rechtsstaat). As part of a broader investigation into system-level risks in the digital welfare state, Maarten Bouwmeester examines the (mal)functioning of rule of law control mechanisms in the childcare benefits scandal.

Season 4 of the podcast Law in Action revolves around this year’s special issue, “The quest for implementation: can governments still get things done?”, of the Journal of Empirical Research on Law in Action (Recht der Werkelijkheid). In this episode you will meet your hosts: Paulien de Winter, assistant professor of empirical legal research at the University of Groningen, and Heinrich Winter, professor of public administration at the University of Groningen. They’ll talk you through the set-up of the season and the background of the podcast.

During the first 6 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic the hearings of (urgent) family cases continued with the use of telephones, Skype or in hybrid format. This created all kinds of participation challenges. Anne Janssen examines to what extent litigants were able to effectively participate during these hearings. To do so she applies McKeever’s remote justice framework, the so-called ‘ladder of legal participation’ to these specific litigants.

In Belgium, the Central Solvency Register (RegSol) was launched within the commercial courts in 2017. Lisa Pelssers, together with Christophe Dubois researched how RegSol was designed and developed within the commercial courts and the impact it had on the working context of its stakeholders. They conclude that without mobilizing and involving court practitioners in the design, development and implementation of the tool, its capacity to increase access to and transparency of justice will remain problematic and controversial.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on everyone in a way nobody could have predicted and the judicial system was no exception. Marieke Dubelaar, together with María Bruquetas-Callejo and Karen Geerstema, analysed the role of the lawyer in criminal law, immigration detention law and asylum law in the context of digitalisation measures during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the Netherlands.