In the legal literature on European integration there is a rather stereotyped tendency to constantly discover new elements of rupture with the past. In the legal domain, at every step we are confronted with some revolutionary novelty arising from European institutions and practices; on a regular basis, we face innovations which are said to mark significant developments in respect of the traditional forms of international governance as well as in respect of the traditional forms of national federalism. The vast literature on the interpretative criteria adopted by the European Court of Justice (hereafter the “ECJ”) only partially escapes this tendency. Surely the experience of European legal integration does not lack revolutionary ruptures and, also from the viewpoint of legal argumentation, it is true that the interaction between jurists coming from different legal experiences has produced some novelties: for example, an increasing hybridization and crossover effect (“Europeanisation”) between patterns of legal reasoning which are characteristic of different national legal cultures. However, this phenomenon has been largely tempered by the typically French syllogistic judicial style of ECJ's rulings. Moreover, despite the novelties identified, the literature on Community law interpretation cannot deny the apparent fact that the interpretative criteria and, more generally, the legal argumentation techniques of the ECJ are essentially the same ones which are familiar to the national legal contexts. It would be surprising if this were not the case, since the judges of the ECJ are trained within the national legal systems and the judgments of the Court are generally expected to be implemented by the national courts. Their grounds must thus be perceived as being legally sound, and not merely political or evocative.

With a growing number of online services which aim to offer their product to a global audience, it becomes increasingly more important to keep informed about the rules and guidelines regulating this business within the countries of the targeted audience. The following article explains the main rules of liability for online services in Germany with special regard to the Telemedia Act.

Since the European Union (EU) agreed upon the extension of its activities to the fields of foreign, security, and criminal policy in the Maastricht Treaty, the question of the delimitation of those new areas of EU competence towards the “classical” policies under the Treaty of the European Community (TEC) has been present. The broad and rather vague scope of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in the so-called second pillar of the EU and the area of political cooperation covered by the third pillar presents several uncertainties. One such uncertainty is the relationship between the supranational legal order under the TEC and the more intergovernmental and diplomacy-based cooperation under the Treaty on the European Union (TEU). Although the EU was organized within a single institutional structure, the substantial differences with regard to voting procedures, competences of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the role of the European Commission rendered a clear separation of competences under the different pillars compulsory: CFSP remains beyond the jurisdiction of the ECJ; the Commission and the European Parliament have only marginal rights of participation; and the legal obligations under the second pillar cannot claim supremacy over national law or direct effect.

The following elaboration has two purposes. One is to invite further reflections on the recent incident of the German sports car manufacturer, Porsche, revealing its until-then unknown substantive holdings in Volkswagen, its much larger competitor. The Porsche incident provoked a host of reactions, ranging from satisfaction to outrage to consternation. The essay's second purpose is to stimulate considerations about likely policy responses and their implications. While the remarkable Porsche incident illustrates the particular nature of the embeddedness of global financial markets, meaning that while investors can inject and pull out of nationally located business opportunities in a seemingly uninhibited fashion, this activity is nevertheless occurring within a complex regulatory setting. As this intervention shows, such transnational settings often require sophisticated regulatory structures and responses. But it is crucial to ensure that – especially in times as the current financial crisis – no excessive accumulation of regulatory actions occurs. Consequently, blind regulatory spots as the ones revealed in this paper will ultimately occur. Nevertheless, it is important that market participants and potential investors are aware of them because then it those blind spots can be used efficiently.

In 1944 Raphael Lemkin wrote in his book titled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: “By Genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” Four years later, on 9 December 1948 the term “genocide” coined by Lemkin simply by merging the Greek word “genos” (people) and the Latin word “caedere” (to kill) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in the Genocide Convention. Now, six decades later an international conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Genocide Convention took place from the 4th – 6th December in Marburg and the city of Frankfurt in Hesse/Germany sponsored mainly by the German Foreign Office and the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation. The main purpose was to discuss the implications of the genocide convention from 1948 on an international platform with scholars from different countries and disciplines.