Samenvatting

We investigate a recent development in the practice of the civil courts: judges increasingly devote attention to the underlying conflict of parties instead of only to their legal dispute. In administrative law, this development has already been codified and termed ‘de Nieuwe zaaksbehandeling’, but not so in other areas of law.
Lawyers know that social conflicts are transformed into legally viable disputes so that the court can decide on them. For a long time, the most important task for lawyers was to resolve those legal disputes. Nowadays, that does not seem to be enough: judges should become problem solvers. Civil judges seem to blend in with these new requirements, but the question is whether the new approach really works. Based on our empirical material of 100 observed cases in civil law, we answer the following questions. 1. What do judges actually do in civil cases when they address underlying conflicts and try to steer parties toward a settlement? 2. What effects do these interventions of judges have on the outcome of cases? 3. How are these interventions perceived by the parties in terms of procedural justice?