Like surfers, legislators … who wish to change everyday social norms must wait for signs of a rising cultural support, catching it at just the right time... (Kagan and Skolnick 1993: 85) The empirical study of the relation between the way a law comes into being and its effectiveness in practice is an underdeveloped subject in the sociology of law. In this article this relation is studied with respect to smoking bans in the Netherlands. The focus is on private companies in general, with special attention for Dutch cafés, bars, hotels and restaurants (where such a ban was recently introduced). Dutch smoking bans in private establishments were only enacted after the government was convinced of public support and after a period of selfregulation. This proved to be a good preparation. The general picture of the relation between the emergence and the effectiveness of smoking bans in Dutch hotels, restaurants etc. is much the same. However, there is one sector - bars, pubs and the like – in which the smoking ban has encountered problems. In this sector a fourth of the establishments refuse to comply. A question addressed in this article is whether the legislator acted too precipitously with respect to this sector. This is obviously the case: there is less public support for smoking bans in such establishments and there had not been a preparatory period of selfregulation.

This contribution seeks to explain our commitment to the ambition to establish constitutional government, given the fact that this ambition appears to be unsuccessful. As for the latter, it is argued that the constitutional ambition is unsuccessful in that it is based on the idea of legal closure, whereas the practice of constitutional decision-making shows a continuous failure to establish such closure. To explain why political communities are nevertheless drawn to the constitutional ambition, this contribution defends that the idea of the constution as a governing normative framework functions as a useful fiction. This fiction, so the argument goes, facilitates a certain kind of public debate that enables political communities to express their collective identity.

By the end of 2007, the world’s urban population had outnumbered the amount of people living in rural areas. Urbanization is expected to increase strongly in the developing world over the coming years, most of it through informal ways of accessing land and housing. In the initiatives of governments and donor organizations to deal with these developments, the concept of tenure security features increasingly prominently. It is inter alia expected to encourage investment in housing improvement, facilitate access to public services such as gas, water and electricity and also to make formal credit available. There is, however, no consensus as to what tenure security exactly means or how it is to be established. In the present paper, development policy based on establishing tenure security through land titling is critically examined and with the emphasis on urban informality in Latin America, an alternative concept of tenure security is proposed.

Like surfers, legislators … who wish to change everyday social norms must wait for signs of a rising cultural support, catching it at just the right time... (Kagan and Skolnick 1993: 85) The empirical study of the relation between the way a law comes into being and its effectiveness in practice is an underdeveloped subject in the sociology of law. In this article this relation is studied with respect to smoking bans in the Netherlands. The focus is on private companies in general, with special attention for Dutch cafés, bars, hotels and restaurants (where such a ban was recently introduced). Dutch smoking bans in private establishments were only enacted after the government was convinced of public support and after a period of selfregulation. This proved to be a good preparation. The general picture of the relation between the emergence and the effectiveness of smoking bans in Dutch hotels, restaurants etc. is much the same. However, there is one sector - bars, pubs and the like – in which the smoking ban has encountered problems. In this sector a fourth of the establishments refuse to comply. A question addressed in this article is whether the legislator acted too precipitously with respect to this sector. This is obviously the case: there is less public support for smoking bans in such establishments and there had not been a preparatory period of selfregulation.