The latest developments at the level of the United Nations aiming at promoting more inclusive and effective international tax cooperation underly a significant momentum within the complex dynamics of global taxation. The objective of the present contribution is to offer a reflection upon international tax cooperation in light of the 2024 Montesquieu lecture. More in particular, this contribution aims at proposing an alternative approach based on a global legal pluralist stance. In the opinion of the author, not only this legal pluralist approach fully acknowledges substantive tax sovereignty, but also represents a realistic path towards a more inclusive and effective international tax cooperation framework.

Since 2010, recurrent human rights violations of migrants working on building new or refurbishing existing infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar have been denounced. This paper focuses on three of the main actors involved in those violations—Qatar, FIFA and Switzerland—in order to determine how shared responsibility could be a useful framework to ensure protection of and reparation to the victims. The article also raises serious questions about the application of shared responsibility and the effective enforcement of human rights when non-state actors are involved.

The article1 argues that the ‘information paradigm’, within which the concept of ‘average’ consumer operates, is unfit to provide adequate financial protection to consumers in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and in the wake of the digital age. As the complexity of financial and digital financial services increases, consumers are expected to educate themselves and become financially literate, while traders’ liability and state intervention are reduced to a minimum. ‘Average’ consumers are turned into ‘responsible’ ones. Using as examples the Mortgage Directive and European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA)’s position on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), the article shows that the former ‘paternalistic’ attitude towards consumer protection in both EU legislation and policy making was replaced with a ‘self-help’ approach and contests the general wisdom regarding consumers’ ability to participate in financial markets or understand the risks posed by novel products and services facilitated by technical innovation and digitization. The article calls for a reconsideration of the information paradigm and for a pro-active approach of the EU regulatory bodies to provide consumers with efficient protection.

As President Trump reminds us every day, we live in the era of social media. While legal scholars are busy discussing, rethinking and opening fields of law to accommodate the societal changes triggered by the Internet, they have been rather slow in assessing its potential impact on their own communication and publishing practices. This is a blind spot, which this paper aims to explore. More precisely, this piece argues that blogs and social media are suitable communication means for legal scholarship and provides some pragmatic advice on how to use them. This paper first draws a general sketch of two key transformations in legal scholarship: the transnationalization of legal scholarship and the desacralization of the legal texts. It is argued that they are provoked by the rapid digitalization of our societies and are key drivers of a needed shift in scholarly communication. They constitute the wider backdrop for the analysis in the second and third sections of the function and practice of blogs and Twitter in legal scholarship.

This article aims to propose a methodological design to explain and assess the land titling programs that have been implemented in Colombia since 1991. The methodology incorporates elements from social and legal sciences in order to analyze the results of land titling programmes in terms of the campesinos’ legal and social relationship with their land. This methodology focuses on evaluating whether land titling programs produced a change in the beneficiaries’ land rights. Consequently, the proposed analysis helps to understand how legal regulations affect and transform social relationships.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos treated Tilburg University to a colorful and rich pallet of topics during his Montesquieu lecture that prompted self-reflection and critical review of the role of law in our western societies. He argued that the way the law functions today leads to the creation of an abyssal line that creates radical exclusions. Although critical of the role of law and the legal regime in western societies, he encourages us, lawyers of the 21st century, to reform and further develop the law in such a way that it is built on democratic pluralism, interculturality and dignity and as such contributes to a more inclusive society. In this short reflection on de Sousa Santos’ Lecture, I highlight some examples and situations that show how rules and procedures of Western societies can have detrimental effects on large groups of refugees and migrants.

One of the challenges of climate change litigation is the difficulty of linking particular climate change impacts to emissions from a specific source, referred to as the 'proof problem'. The difficulty is mainly caused by scientific uncertainties and gaps in evidence, which has been exploited by defendants seeking to deny that their emissions can be linked to specific impacts. The paper argues that application of 'precautionary principle', which requires decision-maker to take measures to prevent harm even where there is no conclusive scientific evidence, could be used to respond to the 'proof problem'. It discusses how the principle can be used to hold entities and public authorities liable in climate change litigation. It provides a background of the principle, how it has been applied in litigation and how the application can be extended to climate change liability. It includes a discussion of climate related cases which have applied this principle to provide insights on how courts have applied the principle.

In recent years scholars from various disciplines have turned their attention to transnational regimes of regulation that are chiefly developed outside state-driven frameworks. The rise of such "transnational private regulation" has also led to the emergence of private meta-regulation. The term 'meta-regulation' commonly refers to processes through which a regulatory body oversees another and sets standards for its activities or performance of regulation. In the public domain, meta-regulation has been associated with the devolution of regulatory activities by a statutory body to private actors with the view to enhance voluntary rule compliance, awareness of responsibilities among the regulated and reduce public enforcement costs. However, in the transnational private domain the rationale for meta-regulation appears to be a different one. We contend that meta-regulation in this domain is less concerned with the goal of enhancing rule compliance and efficiency in enforcement, but instead is more prominently concerned with the bolstering of the integrity, legitimacy and accountability of private regulatory regimes and the coordination between such regimes. To furnish this argument the paper develops a comparative analysis of two sectoral private meta-regulators involved in transnational private regulation: the Global Food Safety Initiative in the food industry and the European Advertising Standards Alliance in the advertising industry. These two organizations have developed guidelines, benchmarks and performance indicators for other private bodies involved in transnational regulatory activities. The comparative analysis is focused around four principled and interlinked questions: (i) What has driven the emergence of meta-regulation in the private regulatory domain?; (ii) What are the forms and functions of private meta-regulation?; (iii) What is the relationship with public regulation and regulators?; and (iv) How and to what extent does private meta-regulation contribute to the legitimization of transnational private regulation?