With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.

This paper examines the idea of a common European legal culture by exploring its foundational component, ‘collective legal consciousness’, in three EU states: the UK, Poland and Bulgaria. Using a comparative research design and a variety of methods of data collection, it suggests that, underneath the thin layer of EU consensus, there are some fundamental differences in perceptions of law. The evidence shows that legal ideas are infused with perceptions of the political system. This finding suggests that the creation of a shared European legal culture depends on the prior formation of a common transnational polity right across the EU, together with a sense of political identity and of trust in the legitimacy of the European political authorities. The paper also demonstrates the multilayered character of collective legal consciousness, allowing different images of law to co-exist, underpinned by the perception of the source with which each image is associated.

This article presents a selective survey of current law and society research in the Netherlands. After a brief historical sketch, it focuses on contemporary Dutch studies on legal effectiveness and several studies on courts and dispute resolution. Based on a review of both fields, I identify two important trends in Dutch law and society research. The first trend is that, since the 1970s, most researchers have been interested in ‘old gap studies’, which primarily focus on the efficacy of law. In recent years, however, public opinion in the Netherlands has become increasingly critical of the Dutch justice system. I argue that this has generated a second trend in Dutch law and society research, which I refer to as ‘new gap studies’. Unlike traditional gap studies, their primary focus is not the efficacy but the legitimacy of law. In the final section, I draw several general conclusions and I look forward to the future of law and society research in de Netherlands.

Recent surveys in the UK and the Netherlands indicate that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the justice system. But who are these ‘critics’ of the justice system? Most previous studies only produced general statistics, while the persons behind the figures remained invisible. By contrast, this article aims to put a face to these numbers and discusses two ways of analysing the profile of the critics. Based on a review of existing survey data, the article first looks at their ‘demographic profile’. Next, the article also considers a second, alternative, approach. Based on their level of legal awareness and legal identification, it distinguishes four different ‘normative profiles’: legalists, loyalists, cynics and outsiders. Moreover, the article shows how these normative profiles may be applied in future comparative studies on legal mobilisation and legal protest. It is concluded that combining both approaches will help us to look beyond common stereotypes and consider the critics of the justice system as real persons with genuine concerns about the administration of justice in their country.