Laboratorium

Peeters LawAntwerp – Brussels

Karen-Anne Peeters
I.

Karen-Anne Peeters

Lawyer (Advocaat) · Antwerp & Brussels

The firm I founded largely handles cross-border matters. Every case is placed within the wider context in which it arises. Anyone who instructs me has a single point of contact, from the first conversation through to the conclusion of the matter.

Education and memberships

  • Licentiate in Law (2006, Universiteit Antwerpen), a degree now known as a Master of Laws.
  • Graduate in Commercial Sciences and Business Administration — management, tourism and recreation (1997, Thomas More Hogeschool, formerly Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen), a qualification now known as a professional bachelor's degree.
  • Postgraduate programme in Spanish Law for foreign jurists (University of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 2010).
  • Certificate in French–Dutch bilingualism (Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris, 1996).
  • Member of the Antwerp Bar and of the Ordre Français des Avocats du Barreau de Bruxelles.
  • Member of the Deutsch-Spanische Juristenvereinigung.

Before founding Peeters Law, I worked at French-speaking, Spanish and British law firms. Those years brought me into contact with a wide range of legal cultures and ways of working. I work principally in Dutch, French, English, German and Spanish, and, less frequently, in Portuguese and Catalan. In conjunction with fellow lawyers, I also handle matters in Italian and Chinese.

Beyond my practice, I am the founder of Salon Nieuw-Zuid, a literary circle in Antwerp where literature, art, law and society meet.

II.

Expertise

My practice focuses primarily on matters in which different legal frameworks intersect. A significant proportion of these matters is cross-border and raises questions of private international law: which court has jurisdiction, which law applies, and what effect will a judgment, instrument or legal relationship have in another state? Spanish law is an important and recurring component of the practice.

Legal complexity, however, does not arise only across national borders. Even within a single legal order, a concrete situation can rarely be fully understood through the lens of a single field of law. An estate may simultaneously raise questions of property law, matrimonial property law, company law and taxation. A business dispute may lie at the intersection of contract law, company law, the law of liability and intellectual property. A financial dispute may involve disclosure obligations, regulatory supervision, investor protection and questions of causation.

The practice therefore extends beyond cross-border matters to legal questions that cross boundaries more broadly: between states, legal systems and fields of law.

My work consists above all in safeguarding that coherence.

The situation

Those who seek out a lawyer often come not with a question but with a situation: a house in another country, a collaboration that has broken down, an estate no one had foreseen, an investment that turns out to be other than it was presented, a name or work being used by another, a letter or decision that sets something in motion.

The question distilled from all this is already the result of choices: which framework, which characterisation, which area of law? Often those choices have already been made before the first meeting.

The situation itself, too, never arrives unprocessed. What is recounted is remembered and then, in good faith, arranged in the direction of the story that has meanwhile taken shape. A good story is not yet a true story, and this holds on both sides of the table: the jurist who listens, too, most readily recognises what he already knows.

This practice therefore tries to begin at the beginning.

The first task is the finding of law in the proper sense: to draw out of the situation the question that truly lies within it.

Sometimes it proves smaller than feared, sometimes larger than hoped, sometimes different from what was put forward. What truly needs protecting or achieving comes first in this, not the legal instrument that at first sight seems to fit it.

At the outset this takes more time than giving an immediate answer; that time is the method.

And it does not run in one direction: whoever brings a matter knows the situation, the jurist knows the frameworks. The question is sought in the conversation between the two.

The finding of law therefore does not begin only with the search for a rule to fit a question already fixed. The question itself, too, must be found. It arises from the facts, from the way in which those facts are understood and from the possible legal characterisations that can be applied to them. A different characterisation may make a different question visible; a different question may lead to a different legal path.

Therein lies, too, the craftsmanlike character of legal work. Not in placing a situation as quickly as possible within a familiar category, but in carefully holding open the various possible readings until it becomes clear which of them truly has legal significance.

Often these are matters that cross borders: those of states, but equally those between branches of law, legal concepts and frames of thought.

An estate may be connected with several countries. A family status may be understood differently in two legal orders. An agreement may be performed somewhere other than where it was concluded. A company may be established in one country while its activities or their consequences are situated elsewhere. A work or trade mark may be protected territorially and at the same time exploited internationally. A financial relationship may be governed by contractual rules, European regulation and public supervision. An international professional career may bring together several systems of social security and different property-law consequences.

But it may just as well concern a purely Belgian matter in which earlier advice contradicts itself, a case that seems simple but keeps chafing, or the need for a second look. Not only at the answer, but at the framing of the question itself.

A situation may be put to me at info@peeterslaw.com, and receives a first and honest assessment, even where the conclusion is that the question is better placed elsewhere.

More about the background to this working method can be found on the methodology page.

Areas of work

The practice covers a broad field of private and economic law, with particular experience in matters where different areas of law or legal systems come together.

Recurring areas of law include:

  • private international law and cross-border disputes;
  • Spanish law and Belgian–Spanish legal relationships;
  • succession law and international estate planning;
  • family and matrimonial property law;
  • property and real estate law;
  • contract and liability law;
  • company law and commercial legal relationships;
  • financial law, banking law and investor protection;
  • intellectual property law;
  • cross-border social security.

That enumeration is not a division into separate departments. In concrete matters several of these domains may play a part at once.

A question about an estate cannot be resolved without examining the matrimonial property or the ownership structure of real estate. A dispute between shareholders may at the same time contain questions of contract and of liability. A copyright problem may be bound up with a licence, a company-law relationship or international exploitation. A financial matter may turn not only on the content of an agreement, but also on supervision, causation and the differing position of the various actors involved.

The area of law with which a client comes in is therefore not necessarily the area of law in which the decisive question ultimately proves to lie.

Where a matter requires specific local, procedural, fiscal or other specialist expertise, that is brought in without losing sight of the coherence of the matter.

PIL · IP · FIN

Private International Law · Intellectual Property · Financial Law, Investor Protection & Liability

Within this broader field of practice, three legal perspectives recur with particular frequency: private international law, intellectual property, and financial law, especially as it relates to investor protection and liability.

They neither define the limits of the practice nor constitute three separate departments. Rather, they are recurring legal perspectives in matters that may also engage succession law, family property law, real estate law, contract law, company law or cross-border social security.

Particular contexts

Some matters arise from a life or career that does not play out within a single legal order.

EU, NATO and SHAPE personnel

An international career may give rise to legal questions about family, assets, real estate, succession, social security, taxation, privileges and immunities.

Not all of those questions belong to the same area of law. Their mutual relationship often forms precisely the core of the matter.

I advise on the private-law aspects that flow from this, if desired in the language in which the client can express themselves most precisely.

North American clients with plans in Europe

For clients from the United States and Canada who wish to settle in Belgium, Spain or Portugal, acquire real estate there, set up an undertaking or organise their family and property situation across several countries, I examine the private-law consequences of doing so.

Questions may arise, among other things, about real estate, agreements, companies, marriage and matrimonial property, estates, wills, international jurisdiction and applicable law.

Where the actual residence or immigration procedure requires specific assistance, I work together on it with a fellow lawyer who specialises in that field.

Contact

An initial consultation can be arranged at info@peeterslaw.com.

Consultations are possible in Antwerp, Brussels or online.

III.

Legal Ethics

My practice rests on the ethical principles of the legal profession. These protect you and ground our working relationship in trust.

  • Confidentiality
  • Independence
  • Loyalty
  • Transparency
  • Competence
IV.

Offices

My Antwerp office is a few steps from the Palace of Justice, in the Nieuw Zuid district. In Brussels I am based on the Avenue des Arts, in the Art-Loi quarter, at the heart of the European district. From both cities I practise with local roots and an international outlook.

Antwerp & Brussels. Belgian roots, European perspective.

Consultations are possible at the office in Antwerp or Brussels, and online.

V.

Contact

Register here to receive our newsletters, or send us a message. The practice communicates in English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish, and additionally in Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and Chinese.

Peeters Law Antwerp

Jos Smolderenstraat 65
BE-2000 Antwerp
+32 3 377 83 53

Peeters Law Brussels

Avenue des Arts 44
BE-1040 Brussels
+32 2 884 74 74

Email

info@peeterslaw.com

This form does not give rise to a lawyer-client relationship. Your message will be treated with strict professional confidentiality.

VI.

Method

Finding the law is what the jurist and the lawyer essentially do. Not forcing a square peg into a round hole, but the reasoned path from the facts and the legal sources to a defensible legal determination. My method is not an end in itself: it is a way of finding the law — rechtsvinding, in the Dutch and German lawyers' term — a disciplined way of walking that path, aimed at not skipping questions along the way.

Complex cross-border matters can almost never be reduced to a single question. I therefore approach a matter not linearly but relationally. The capacity in which the court sits, the nature of the question, language, legal culture and strategy act upon one another continually. Keeping that interplay in view forms the heart of my working method.

The model produces no answer; it orients the analysis. It names the dimensions that, in my experience, deserve particular attention before a legal position is taken, and so provides a counterweight to tunnel vision and to the premature reduction of a case to a single rule, a single field, a single norm level or a single perspective.

I extend this model where necessary with two additional dimensions:

  • A sixth dimension through which structural fault lines can be made visible.
  • A seventh dimension through which the analytical framework itself becomes the subject of reflection.

Traditions of private international law

The approach draws on three traditions of private international law:

  • First, the idea of a legal coordinate system: the seat of the legal relationship, without assuming that this seat is objectively given for the jurist (Von Savigny);
  • Second, the reflexive movement implicit in the distinction between rule and decision (Mayer);
  • Third, the willingness to make structural tensions visible where further systematisation no longer brings additional clarity (Heyvaert).

Seven reference points

The individual insights on which this working method rests are not new. They are drawn from broader currents within legal scholarship and from authors who have each illuminated a particular aspect of legal analysis. What follows is therefore not a theory of law, but a series of points of attention that can help to approach complex matters from several angles.

  • Territoriality and the question of which law applies. A legal problem does not arise in a vacuum, but within a territorial and institutional legal order. The question of which law applies, and where a legal relationship finds its legal connecting factor, therefore remains fundamental.
  • The relation between rule and decision. Private international law lives not only on rules of law, but also on decisions taken elsewhere that claim effect here. The distinction between the applicable rule and the decision already taken demands a reflexive gaze: the jurist asks not only which norm applies, but also how rules and decisions relate to one another.
  • Multilayered legal thought and the comparative method. Legal questions must be placed within a multilayered normative reality in which national, European and international norms act upon one another continually. The comparative method can help to make the assumptions of a legal order more visible.
  • The functional approach to legal questions. A legal qualification does not necessarily coincide with the real question the parties wish to resolve. Behind notions such as liability, the clause of accrual, gift or testament other interests may lie concealed: protection, continuity, autonomy or the management of risk.
  • Language, legal culture and legal qualification. Legal concepts derive their meaning in part from the language and legal culture in which they function. Concepts that appear comparable at first sight may, in different legal systems, possess a different function, scope or institutional background. The jurist must therefore translate not only between languages, but also between legal categories and legal cultures.
  • The dissection of normative structures and the critique of the system. Even when the facts have been correctly established, the qualifications rightly formulated and the applicable norms correctly identified, the law itself may fall short. It is there that the Heyvaertian singularity appears: the point where further systematisation no longer brings additional clarity.
  • Perception, memory and cognitive limits. Facts do not speak for themselves. They are perceived, remembered, recounted and interpreted by human beings. Legal analysis must therefore reckon with memory distortion, selective perception, narrative reconstruction and other cognitive limits that affect how facts are established.

The methodological staircase

Together these reference points form not a loose enumeration but a succession of questions the jurist can ask:

  • where is the legal relationship situated?
  • how do rules and decisions relate to one another?
  • in which normative layers does the problem play out?
  • what question are the parties really trying to solve?
  • which qualification fits within the relevant linguistic and legal-cultural context?
  • what if even that legal framework falls short?
  • and how reliable, in all of this, are the facts and the observers on which the analysis rests?

Characteristics of the method

This working method does not start from the idea that legal problems can be solved according to a fixed scheme. Nor does it put forward new rules of law or an alternative theory of law.

The proposed structure seeks only to keep a number of insights already present in legal scholarship visible in their mutual coherence when complex matters are analysed.

It does not replace classical legal analysis and remains, like every model, a simplification of reality.

My method is a tool for analysis and structuring. The ultimate legal judgment always depends on:

  • the facts of the file;
  • the applicable law;
  • the professional assessment of the jurist.

The method distinguishes between factual, legal and normative analysis. A description of reality does not automatically determine what the law ought to require, nor does a rule of law eliminate the need for interpretation and judgement.

The human factor

That assessment remains human work. Facts are not merely established; they are perceived, remembered, recounted and interpreted. Clients, witnesses, lawyers, experts, judges and public authorities all act within the limits of human cognition.

Insights from legal psychology, among them the work of Hans Crombag, remind us that errors arise not only from legal complexity but also from memory distortion, selective perception, confirmation bias, narrative reconstruction and the human tendency to attribute causal coherence too quickly to events whose connections remain partially uncertain.

The core of those insights can be summed up in a single warning: a good story is not yet a true story. Stories convince because they fit what we expect people to do and how things go — not because every part is anchored in the facts. What is told has been remembered; what is remembered has been ordered, in good faith and retroactively, in the direction of the story that has meanwhile taken shape. Details that do not fit fade away; connections that were perhaps never there become self-evident. And that tendency spares no one: the jurist who listens, too, involuntarily tests an account for its plausibility rather than for its anchoring, and most readily recognises what he already knows. The discipline consists not in doubting everything, but in not letting the story set faster than the facts allow.

This caution, however, does not lead to scepticism. The fact that a causal relationship cannot be observed with absolute certainty does not mean that every conclusion is arbitrary. Legal practice rests instead on the reasoned assessment of indications, probabilities, factual convergences and explanatory contexts.

Between illusory certainty and paralysing doubt unfolds the very space of legal reasoning.

It is precisely for this reason that this method seeks to keep several dimensions of a file visible at the same time. The aim is not to eliminate human limitations, but to reduce the risk that a single perspective, a single narrative or a single interpretive framework comes to dominate the entire analysis unnoticed.

Facts never exist in a raw state: they are perceived and then interpreted. The observers themselves remain fallible. And at times, even when the perception is accurate and the interpretation careful, the available legal categories fail to capture in full the reality they claim to order. At that point the analysis ceases to be merely a question of fact or of law and becomes a question of structure.

From function to qualification

The strategic dimension examines not only which legal instrument might apply, but first which human, economic or familial problem presents itself.

Attention thus shifts from the legal form to the function the law is supposed to perform. Behind notions such as liability, gift, testament or the clause of accrual comparable interests may lie concealed, such as protection, continuity, autonomy or the management of risk.

Only once that function has become sufficiently visible does the question arise of which legal qualification is most appropriate within the relevant language, legal culture and legal order.

It can then be examined whether the available legal categories actually carry the function concerned. Where they prove not to, what the Heyvaertian singularity seeks to lay bare becomes visible: not necessarily a lack of information, but possibly a tension within the normative framework itself.

In short — a craft

In plain terms: this working method is not a formula and not a calculation. It is an aid to memory for holding several angles in view at once, much as a craftsman studies his work from several sides before setting his hand to the piece.

The formula is best read as a compact notation of a methodological warning: not a machine that produces answers, but a map of dimensions that may deserve particular attention in legal analysis.

The aim is not prediction but orientation; not certainty but the reduction of analytical blind spots.

At its core the work remains a craft: reading closely, asking the right questions, weighing languages and legal cultures against one another, and arriving at a reasoned position through experience and judgement. It is patient handwork, carried by skill and care.

Legal reasoning remains human work. The method supports the finding of the law; it does not replace legal judgment.

The full architecture

For those who wish to see the structure in detail, the complete architecture is set out below: the five dimensions and the two meta-layers of my method.

Method

My method

An architecture of Law-Finding

No Law-Finding without configuration.

The method marks where judgement falls; the judgement remains a craft.

Ω(D(t))  with  D(t) ∈ 𝒫(T, M, N, C, S),  Σ(D) The notation is not a calculation rule but a structural notation: it marks levels and relations — the distinction between the file, its trajectory and the gaze that observes both — and not an outcome to be computed. The notation does not indicate how a legal solution is calculated; it identifies the minimum analytical framework that must be traversed before a legal conclusion is reached — a compact notation of a methodological warning against tunnel vision and errors of legal reasoning.

The method is a single architecture with a core. Five dimensions span the space of analysis; two meta-layers are added to them. It is a single edifice with a core, not a coupling of two models. It does not serve up a ready-made solution; it is a map that orders where the judgement falls.

A legal problem is therefore not an abstract rule but a configuration. Law-Finding does not set out from the norm alone but from the concrete configuration of the facts in relation to the potentially applicable norms; only within the space in which the file is situated does the rule acquire meaning. That file is a point D which, as facts, norms and choices shift, describes a trajectory D(t). That space is not computed but read — and the reading itself is a craft.

The five dimensions

The five simultaneously operative dimensions

T
Territorial context. The seat of the legal relationship (jurisdiction, conflict of laws, geography): a rule from another system applies only with its systematic and geographic embedding, for the comparison bears fruit only for those who see why and for what it exists there.
ExampleWhere a Belgian national whose last habitual residence was in Tenerife dies, the Succession Regulation (650/2012) in principle designates Spanish law to govern the estate as a whole, subject to a valid choice of the law of the deceased's nationality (Art. 22).
M
Substantive fields of law. The substantive branches of law that converge, their de-compartmentalisation and their order of precedence — fields that presuppose one another and can be read only in their interconnection.
ExampleSuccession cannot be read in isolation from matrimonial property law, so it must first be settled which assets fall within the estate.
N
Normative structure. The stratification that marks contemporary private law (the working-through of higher norms, the European layer, territorial differentiation); the sanction follows the purport of the rule infringed, as far as its rationale requires and no further.
ExampleAn unfair term does not bind the consumer, while the contract subsists for the remainder: the sanction stays proportionate to the purport of the rule infringed.
C
Language and legal culture. Law is above all a work of language: concepts carry the meaning of their own system, a misread term shifts the applicable law itself, and whoever seeks the source must master the conceptual apparatus — including its historical shifts.
ExampleEnglish domicile coincides neither with the continental notion of residence nor with habitual residence; to equate the concepts is to shift the applicable law.
S
Strategy. The position and the choices of the actors (forum, choice of law, timing), at once input and resultant: it steers the trajectory of the file and, as a strategic position, itself emerges from the reading of the other axes. This dual role is not a contradiction but the point at which the model becomes reflexive — the only axis where the outcome of the analysis acts back on its input.
ExampleThe choice of forum and the timing of the writ co-determine which conflict-of-laws rules the seised court will apply.

The meta-layers

The two meta-layers

Σ
The Heyvaertian fault line. The critical point where normative structures collide, interpretations become unstable and the system boundary becomes visible — the moment at which the law shows itself. There no formula suffices; there the craft begins.
ExampleWhere the designated foreign law is incompatible with Belgian international public policy, its application is refused — precisely there the system boundary becomes visible.
Ω
Reflexive observation. The second-order gaze (second-order observation) that perceives the configuration and above all its exceptions, weighs the systems against one another, and makes the choice of characterisation itself an object of analysis. It also examines the assumptions on which a chosen solution rests, asking among other things whether normative conclusions are being drawn unnoticed from factual findings — a question akin to the classical discussion of the naturalistic fallacy.
ExampleIs a claim succession or matrimonial in nature? The characterisation question itself becomes the object of analysis — an observation of the second order.

Conclusion — the craft

The method orders the search; it does not replace it. It is built around context, method and resolution — but no accumulation of detailed rules and no automated application captures what counts: not the pattern, but the exception, the fault line that only the trained, contextual eye recognises. Law-Finding remains a craft: it is learned not from a diagram but in practice, by weighing, comparing and judging. The method is its instrument, not its replacement.

Genealogy Friedrich Carl von Savigny — territoriality and Sitz des Rechtsverhältnisses  ·  Pierre Mayer — rules, decisions and private international law  ·  Walter van Gerven — multilayered legal thought and comparative method  ·  Mieken Puelinckx-Coene — functional qualification and legal technique  ·  Henri Swennen — context, the finding of law and legal craftsmanship  ·  Alfons Heyvaert — dissection of normative structures and critique of the system  ·  Hans Crombag — perception, cognition and the legal construction of facts
Peeters Law  ·  Methodology
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