Public and Private Sovereign Powers in Liberal Models of Property Protection -- Belgium, Sweden, and The Netherlands

This chapter compares the protection of private property from direct and indirect expropriation in three liberal systems: Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Focusing on these liberal systems, the chapter highlights how deeply expropriation lies at the crossroads between different areas of public law (eg constitutional law, fundamental law, and general administrative law); private law (eg property as a right); and mixed fields (eg environment and planning law). Despite an overall system protecting property rights against administrative arbitrariness at a rather similar level, many technical compromises and concrete solutions are reached via different routes, highlighting variations in preferences in liberal systems to curtail administrative powers: Belgium provides fragmented answers as it relies heavily on judge-made law in addition to its federalised system, whereas the Netherlands sequences the administrative process, compartmentalising it in fairly watertight stages where environmental plans and expropriation are kept separate, and Sweden addresses issues pertaining to expropriation topic by topic.