As in many other countries there is a discussion in the netherlands about reforming the law, especially tort law, in the field of traffic accidents, or more generally of all personal accidents. It is often said that there is a need for more knowledge about the functioning of the law in this field. The main objective of the research was to comply with this need. Another objective was start to initiate sociological research in the field of private law in the netherlands. The main part of the research consists of a survey of crash victims. In such a sample, however, there will probably be very few specimens of two important groups' those victims who sued in court and permanently disabled victims. It was decided to study these two groups further: a quantitative analysis of district court judgments and case-studies of very seriously injured people. At the end of the summary a few details of the case studies are given.
Abstract