Civil liability for environmental damage is currently very much the centre of attention. Many countries and international organizations have recently adopted rules in this field or are in the process of doing so. Almost without exception, these rules concentrate on creating a liability regime for damage caused by pollution that is the result of incidents which took place before their entry into force. The problem of damage that is the result of so-called historic pollution — primarily cases of soil contamination — was mostly left outside the range of these regulations. Until recently that is. Last year specific legislation on liability in cases of historic soil contamination was adopted in the Flemish region of Belgium and in the United Kingdom. Other countries like, for example, Denmark are studying the subject. The Netherlands has much greater experience with this type of legislation. It goes back to the Interim Soil Clean-up Act of 1983. The experiences with this act are reflected in a new legal regime for cleaning up contaminated land that came into force in 1994. The objective of this article is to reflect on these Dutch experiences.

Punitive damages are a heavily debated aspect of the US legal system. Courts and commentators from both within and outside the United States have leveled criticism at their foundation and application in current law. It is important to note, however, that punitive damages both originated in and exist in other legal systems. Much of the current debate in the US about punitive damages is fueled by ideological posturing in a national political debate more polarized than at any time in recent memory. It is not surprising that in the midst of such a domestic debate the view of punitive damages from abroad is less than flattering.

In order to stimulate the common market and the cooperation between businesses therein the European Union has always tried to remove the differences between the national corporate laws of the Member States. In 1968 the first directive on corporate law entered into force and since then a number of directives have been drafted and some of them have entered into force. One of the initiatives in this field is the 1985 proposal for a tenth directive concerning the cross-border merger of public limited liability companies.

The concept of sovereignty is not on friendly terms with the concept of tolerance. Sovereignty is an exclusive concept, it is derived from the term ‘supreme power’ and it stands for absolute and comprehensive jurisdiction over the people who find themselves on the territory of the sovereign State. Sovereignty is indeed a State-oriented concept. State sovereignty is the hall-mark of the Westphalian system, a world-order composed of clearly defined, mutually impregnable territorial units. Tolerance is a concept which is man-oriented, it is inclusive, it denotes a state of mind, a mentality, it does not separate, it unites people in spite of their differences.

A Dutch woman married her French husband in 1962. The marriage was entered into on the island of Texel, an island to the north of the Dutch mainland where she had been born in 1938. Once the celebrations were over, the couple settled in France. As a consequence of marrying her French husband the newly-wed wife lost her Dutch nationality and acquired French nationality.