‘Shadow of the Law’ or ‘Shadow of the Settlement’: Experiences with the Dutch Act on Collective Settlement of Mass Damage (WCAM)

Public and private justice may not be such mutually exclusive concepts as commonly viewed. Public court judgments may co-determine private settlements, but also conversely, private settlements may co-determine court judgments. The latter phenomenon can be found particularly in mass disputes leading to collective settlements that receive broad media coverage. This contribution analyses the practice in the Netherlands, where such collective settlements can even be endorsed by the courts under the Act on Collective Settlement of Mass Damage, or the WCAM Act. Individual parties that decline such a settlement and prefer to pursue their case in court may nevertheless be confronted with such a private settlement to which they themselves are not a party. The contribution rounds off with a non-exhaustive stocktaking of salient pros and cons of negotiated settlement and law enforcement, respectively.