Looking Differently at Legal Change: Layering, Conversion, Drift, Displacement and Exhaustion in the Development of Dutch Construction Regulation

Abstract

There are various approaches to studying legal change. Systematic analysis of legal, doctrinal change as produced by courts is one of these. Whilst this approach informs us about ‘what’ has changed, it often does not inform us about ‘why’ or ‘how’ changes have come about. Yet, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions are equally relevant to answer as ‘what’ question if we wish to fully comprehend legal change. Related areas of scholarship (political science, public administration, and socio-legal scholarship) are traditionally more interested in the why and how of legal change. This article seeks to introduce the readership of KJLL to a dominant heuristic applied to study legal change in other areas of scholarship: theorizing on incremental change. This article first briefly reviews the development of this theorizing, and then applies it to study the development of over a hundred years of construction regulation in the Netherlands. It concludes with a discussion on how this theorizing may complement more traditional, doctrinal legal scholarship approaches in providing a more comprehensive understanding of legal change.