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This chapter aims to demonstrate that the fundamental human rights principle that no one should be subjected to (grossly) disproportionate punishment should be interpreted to take into account terminal illness of the offender. It should be applied both during imposition of the sentences and also during execution of already imposed sentences.

In order to reveal whether this principle takes into account serious medical conditions, including terminal illness of the offender in the calculus of the proportionality of punishment and whether it is applicable at the execution stage of sentences, this chapter examined the roots of the fundamental human rights principle of proportionality of punishment by briefly surveying the penal theory, jurisprudence, court cases, laws, and legislative history from the U.S. federal and state jurisdictions and from Europe.

There is a consensus among surveyed theories that terminal illness of the offender is an element of the principle of proportionality of punishment. Thus the fundamental human rights principle must be interpreted to take it into account. The principle should be observed not only at the imposition stage, but also at the execution stage of already imposed sentences.

This chapter re-examines the roots of the fundamental human right to not being subjected to (grossly) disproportionate punishment. It does so in order to demonstrate that the right should be interpreted to take into account terminal illness of the offender and that it should be observed not only at the imposition stage, but also at the execution stage of already imposed sentences.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the implementation of the minimum level of protection against the loss of the home that arises from Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in The Netherlands. The paper focuses on anti-social behaviour-related cases in which the landlord requests the court to issue an eviction order.

The paper is based on a statistical analysis of nearly 250 judgements concerning housing-related anti-social behaviour.

A significant difference is found in the court’s attitude against drug-related anti-social behaviour and other types of nuisance. Moreover, it is found that in two-thirds of the cases, the tenant advanced a proportionality defence. Although the European Court stresses the need of a proportionality check, the Dutch courts ignore the tenant’s proportionality defence in 10 per cent of the cases and issue an eviction order in the majority of all cases. Advancing a proportionality defence does not result in any difference for the court decision.

The paper presents original data on the legal protection against eviction in cases concerning anti-social behaviour. This is the first study that analyses the approach towards housing-related anti-social behaviour in the context of the European minimum level of protection. Whilst centred on legislation and procedures in The Netherlands, its findings and discussion are relevant in other jurisdictions facing similar issues.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the close relationship between the disciplines of law and health-care studies. This interrelation has become particularly evident during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictive human rights provisions have been initiated by many states for the sake of public health. Research focuses on the notional proximity of the principle of proportionality and its health-care correlative: effectiveness. It also goes through the influence of acceptance rates for the application of restrictive measures.

Research focuses on interdisciplinary literature review, taking into consideration judicial decisions and data on acceptance rates of restrictive human rights measures in particular. Analysis goes in depth when two categories of restrictive human rights measures against the spread of the pandemic are examined in depth: restrictive measures to achieve social distancing and mandatory vaccination of professional groups.

Restrictive human rights measures for reasons of public health are strongly affected by the need for effective health-care systems. This argument is verified by judicial decision-making which relies to the necessity of health-care effectiveness to a great extent. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a laminate example of the two disciplines’ interrelation and how they infiltrate each other.

Further implications for research point at the need to institutionalize a cooperative scheme between legal and health-care decision-making, given that this interrelation is strong.

The originality of this paper lies on the interdisciplinary approach between law and health-care studies. It explains how state policies during the pandemic were shaped based on the concepts of effectiveness and proportionality.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the concept of a fair balance between conflicting fundamental rights in the context of intermediary liability for third party copyright infringement.

European Legal Method.

Fair balance is the appropriate conflict resolution mechanism in cases of fundamental rights clashes. Balancing is in essence a call for rational judicial deliberation. In intermediary liability, balancing excludes the imposition of filtering obligations on intermediaries for the purpose of copyright enforcement, but allows blocking.

An in-depth look at a complicated, vague and underdeveloped area of law with significant practical effect.

Clarifying the proper approach to test the constitutionality of a criminal in personam forfeiture, the US Supreme Court has recently determined that only a ‘proportionality test’ can be used to determine whether such a forfeiture violates the prohibition against excessive fines found in the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution. Prior to this determination, lower courts were split as to whether to apply an instrumentality test, a proportionality test, or some combination of the two. The more encompassing instrumentality test, as used in civil in REM forfeiture, only enquires whether the seized property was ‘instrumental’ in the commission of the underlying offence. If property itself was used to facilitate a crime, however slight, the property was forfeit to the government. This test allowed for the forfeiture of huge amounts of currency or property such as an entire estate if the court determined that the property was used as the meeting place for the sale of an occasional marijuana cigarette. On the other hand, the proportionality test requires a judicial analysis of the ‘proportionality’ of the forfeiture to the egregiousness of the underlying criminal activity. In adopting a proportionality rule, the Supreme Court has receded from the bright‐line test for approving forfeiture and reinvested the judiciary with some latitude in examining the more egregious excesses of criminal forfeiture.

Present some empirical evidence on long‐run Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) using a sample of annual data covering the period 1900‐1987. Three exchange rates are used in the analysis: the dollar, yen and French franc against the pound. It is shown that PPP does hold in the long run and that is some evidence for the proportionality and symmetry restrictions. Evidence for exclusiveness is mixed and the results are influenced by model specification. Estimates of error‐correction models show that there are substantial short‐run deviation from PPP that take two to three years to correct.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a model of hierarchical manpower systems which follow proportionality policies in recruitment and promotion of their staff, ostensibly with a view to safeguard the career interests of their existing employees.

The manpower systems are modeled as Markov systems, and their inherent characteristics and long‐term behavior are studied.

Significantly it is shown that such proportionality systems do not compromise on flexibility in the long term, and can also provide an additional means of controlling the blend of manpower in the system. The theoretical results were tested with real‐world data, and a good degree of conformity was observed between the theoretical predictions and the actually observed behaviour.

The model can also be applied to organizations which outsource a part of their work, the outsource workforce being notionally being considered as recruits to the system.

Outsourcing of work is being practiced on an ever‐increasing scale nowadays, and becoming, at times, even controversial, and as a consequence, an increasing number of organizations are resorting to protectionist policies; the model in this paper provides a theoretical framework in which to view and analyze this phenomenon.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

This chapter examines how public attitudes and judgments about tax fairness reflect distributive justice rules about proportionality/contributions, needs, and equality; fairness issues that influence voluntary tax compliance (Hofmann, Hoelzl, & Kirchler, 2008; Spicer & Lundstedt, 1976). Most public polls and some prior research indicate the general public considers progressive income tax rates as fairer than flat tax rates, a reflection of the Needs rule of distributive justice theory; our 1,138 participants respond similarly. However, two-thirds of our politically representative sample of the American public actually assign “fair shares” of income taxes consistently with fairness-as-proportionality above an exempt amount of income, consistent with the Contributions rule of Equity Theory. We argue experimental assignments of fair shares of income taxes can best be understood as a combination of the Needs rule, applied by exempting incomes below the poverty line from income taxation (via current standard deductions) and taxing incomes above this exempt amount at a single tax rate (i.e., a flat-rate tax) consistent with the Proportionality/Contributions rule. Viewed in combination, these two distributive justice rules explain the tax fairness judgments of 89% of our sample and indicate surprising general agreement about what constitutes a fair share of income taxes that should be paid by US citizens from the 5th percentile to the 95th percentile of the income distribution. The joint application of these fairness rules indicates how seemingly competing, partisan distributive justice concerns can inform our understanding of social attitudes about tax fairness across income classes.

This chapter proposes a sociological reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and it focuses on examining the historical processes that first gave rise to this concept. It explains how citizenship has its origins in the transformation of feudal law, a process that culminated in patterns of military organization that characterized the rise of the early modern state in Europe. On this basis, it describes how the growth of constitutional democracy was integrally marked by the militarization of society and explains that military pressures have remained palpable in constitutional constructions of citizenship. In particular, it argues that, through the early growth of democracy, national citizenship practices were closely linked to global conflicts, and they tended to replicate such conflicts in national contexts. It concludes by showing how more recent processes of constitutional norm formation, based largely in international human rights law, have acted to soften the military dimensions of citizenship.