Public bodies have lots of data, but administrative law encourages them insufficiently to share these data with citizens in a comprehensible and meaningful way. This project explores new legal and ethical ways to stimulate and optimize data communication by public bodies and to help citizens in interpreting these data, in particular through visualization tools.

The rise of hybrid business forms ? combining limited liability of corporations with partnership law principles of organizational flexibility and private autonomy ? has made many corporate law mechanisms for balancing conflicting interests optional. It raises the questions if corporate law appropriately protects the incumbent parties as well as creditors, and how the parties complement the law with private contractual arrangements. The research aims to asses these legal and contractual relationships and to develop appropriate mechanisms protecting the incumbent weaker parties as well as third parties. Therefore, the research will apply a comparative functional analysis and the economic theories of the firm.

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Supreme courts all over the world are increasingly under attack for invading the political domain, especially in Public Interest Litigation Cases (PIL). This is illustrated by the Urgenda climate change case, where the Dutch government was ordered to reduce CO2-emissions by 25% in 2020. This ruling invoked the criticism that the court violated the separation of powers doctrine. The proposed research focuses on the response of the highest courts: how do highest courts find or construct legitimacy in those cases? What arguments, methods and strategies do they use? What conceptions of the separation of powers doctrine do they hold? What ideas do they have concerning their lawmaking role in a democracy? Do courts take the possible macro-consequences of their rulings into account, and if so, how do they do this? In the proposed study, we want to investigate these questions empirically (not normatively, as is usual), that is, by investigating the arguments, methods and strategies supreme courts actually use and follow in PIL-cases. For this purpose we use a blend of methods, varying from literary reviews, case law analysis, comparative law, and case studies in four jurisdictions (the Netherlands, South-Africa, the US, and India) with different judicial traditions concerning PIL. The findings will contribute both to theory: separation of powers, lawfinding, and concepts of legitimacy and to practice (guidelines for highest courts to follow which strategy under what circumstances). Moreover, this research opens a horizon for further research on judicial behavior in PIL cases in other jurisdictions.

Primary research challenge: Science-enriched art historical research. Secondary research challenge(s): The project makes use of new possibilities in science and technology in order to understand an essential aspect of painting in the Dutch Golden Age. The ambition is to enrich and alter the study of still life painting through the use of science and technology, combined with thorough philological-historical research. Among other things, making new use of imaging modalities will help to develop an imaging based connoisseurship. The end goal is to reach a better understanding of techniques, procedures for production, and uses of materials that constitute artistic mastery in still life painting and texture rendering; and to contribute significantly to the study of perceptual and cognitive aspects of art production. In the project historical reconstruction of working methods will be combined with scientific and computational analysis of surface textures of actual objects under different light conditions, as well as with computer and human vision research by means of big data analysis methods using annotated databases of large groups of pictorial textures from different periods. Knowledge acquired within the framework will improve our analysis of the reception and conservation of works of art as well; and it will also contribute to a better understanding of texture perception and texture rendering in general. Such knowledge may even be of practical interest for modern coloring and digital industries.