This is from Niels, giving some nice background on Dutch legal life:

“Our legal praxis cultivates an orientation towards the letter of the law in which everything is micro-managed (and expensively so)..”

One of the main reasons why the Netherlands have developed a time/space based differentiation of dealing with the law is that if we didn’t, the whole country would come to a grinding halt. We do have our microlaws – try building a house in the Netherlands. The legal system here is a classical one, implemented by Napoleon when he conquered europe. The general idea behind it is that the law provides a more or less durable set of norms, thus compensating for the volatility of everyday politics, and that the government has to offer ‘legal certainty’ when interfering in society. This means the law is usually a hindrance – it stops people from realizing their ‘grand idea of the week’. This differs greatly from the northern american idea of legal engineering, eg *using* the law to get your grand idea of the week into realization, instead of working around it. In the end, there is hardly such a thing as legal certainty in dutch daily life – it only exists among lawyers and in some courtrooms. Also, the last 5 years several laws have become much broader, allowing for specific implementation – but this depends on the people who influence it. The law on universities(1997) allows them much more organizational freedom, yet the proposed planning laws take a very centralistic stance, and deny the ‘praxis’ -the way spatial development takes place. This creates a very confusing situation, in which people do not understand the laws, and have rely on ‘experts’ to do the finetuning. You will understand that such a separation between the group who *are the experts* and the people who actually have to deal with the consequences does not create a large basis for legitimacy. “Gedogen”, as described in the very nice article you linked to is an “official” practise in only a few situations. Much more common is a very pragmatic way of dealing with situations, in which people try to reason with each other to get things done.

(/some background
Posted by Niels