Category: opinion

I was born in 1945 in the east of the Netherlands. I think I was pretty lucky with that. My life devoted to the science of law, with computer models. Maybe the drive behind it was incomprehension. About how (in Europe) a world of religious sectarianism, social classification, economic exploitation, national socialism, holocaust and war…

The question Donald Trump (USA president) and Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) are antagonists on the issues of Twitter’s tagging Trump posts with the suggestion to check the facts and the USA president’s threat to forbid such through an executive order guiding the FCC. Fig. 1 shows what ignited the action. Trump tweeted on May 28…

To his surprise mr. Sum got, immediately after being informed by Robert Post on how to understand freedom of expression in the USA the opportunity to apply his new insights, when he read the following in Politico magazine: President Donald Trump and his supporters have been hammering Twitter since the social network labeled a pair…

On May 14, a news item appeared on the website of SCHMDT advocatuur (of my son Menno). It is about an academic debate in Germany, in Die Zeit, about the tensions that exist between interests protected by fundamental rights. Between the side effects of coronavirus measures and the urge for individual freedom of action and…

Every day I wake up realizing that I have been lucky. Born in the Netherlands in 1945, I have reached a respectable age without having to defend myself against war, poverty, genocide, pandemics. And in the past 55 years I have had the opportunity to gain and disseminate knowledge about how law and the information…

The professor who believes that computers may have intuition was confirmed in this belief when Deep Blue won a chess match against Kasparov in 1997. In this frame, intuition is the art of making the right choices, even if there are too many possibilities to calculate them. Szent-Giörgyi who believes that intuition provides, when you…

Mister Node had read a piece by Nietzsche from 1873 in 2001, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. It shows that any form of linguistic description shortens and distorts reality, and that we have the tendency to cover this up. He thought it was a crushing piece and attended a lecture about Nietzsche…

A normative debate is an informal thing that nurses coherence to remain between a dynamic community’s ethos and its formal regulation. Economic argument is an organic part of normative debates, but not the only one. The law and the moral values and the communication infrastructures that are nursed in a community are organic parts too.…

Institutions are weird. We recognize them in collections of connected agents that, as a collection, have agency themselves. Like the EU has agency and its member states have agency and their governments, parliaments, executives and judiciaries have agency, just like even small enterprises, cooperations and foundations have. These examples have in common that their agency…