The Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) has repeatedly had to deal with regulation of the medical professions. (1) The frequency of decisions in this area result from the clash between two fundamental values: One is the constitutionally recognized “occupational freedom” (Art. 12 I GG), the other is the health of the population, which justifies the numerous regulations for the medical professions. (2) A recent decision of the Second (Three-Judge) Chamber of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG 1 BvR 881/00 — decided on October 18, 2001) is a further instance of this conflict.

The 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA) has incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into English law. Undoubtedly, it constitutes a very important event since it purports to create a new system of rights protection. In order to achieve this aim, the act also introduces some norms empowering the courts to review acts of the legislative and executive branches. The main vehicle for this provision is Section 3 of the Act, (1) which establishes a presumption of compatibility between national legislation and rights laid out in the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Such a presumption requires courts to systematically attribute to legislation and executive acts the meaning that is most consistent with the protection of rights. Article 3 has been very controversial, (2) particularly concerning the scope of the power it attributes to the courts.

Halbhuber's project started out as a treatise on the policies of European company law (3), but eventually became an analysis of the German academic discussion of European company law. Halbhuber puts the case that German lawyers, entangled in the structures of their national private law doctrine, widely misinterpreted the judgments of the ECJ in Segers (4), Daily Mail (5) and Centros, thus dissuading agents from using foreign (e.g. English or Irish) private limited companies for their business activities in Germany.

On 9 October 2001, the European Court of Justice dismissed (1) a challenge by the Netherlands with the support of Italy and Norway against the Community Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions. (2) Although the Biotech Directive relates to a wide range of public concerns and the Application for its annulment was based on a half-dozen different pleas, the following article will focus on the case as it relates to European Community treaty limitations. It will critically examine the perspectives on the principles of harmonisation and subsidiarity presented in the Application, the Advocate General's Opinion and the Court's Judgment within the broader context of the Community/Union's past and future development. The examination will reveal that in this case the Court has foregone a good opportunity to delimit 'positive integration'. (3) It could have made an important contribution to the on-going discussion about power-sharing between the national and supranational levels. While the judgment does strongly affirm the positive integration paradigm, the margins of the EU's legislative policy competences remain blurred due to its oft-opaque reasoning. The judgment raises, directly and indirectly, as many questions as it answers.

While constitutionalism appears to be a new buzzword in political, public and analytical Eurospeak, it is never quite clear whether there are any shared terms of reference in this debate in “Europe,” let alone on a worldwide scale. To sort out the different approaches and their analytical strengths and weaknesses, this article offers an overview of analytical choices that are likely to determine the type and outcome of discussions about the constitutional significance of the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights (hereafter: the Charter). (2) It juxtaposes the seemingly paradoxical parallel development of a widespread use of “constitutionalism,” and increasingly “constitutionalization,” on the one hand, and the theoretical and political divergence in its application, on the other.

Fritz Stern, who was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association in 1999, commenced his speech on that occasion by asking: “Why do German democracies have to be identified, limited as it were, by associating them with the names of cities: Weimar, Bonn, Berlin. All this does is to emphasize unwelcome discontinuity.” (1)

Even though poverty and poverty-related deaths are still increasing worldwide, too little has been undertaken against them. The question addressed in this article is whether citizens in the industrial countries who are better off have a duty to mitigate or stop the misery of the poor; and if so, what kind of duty is it. One could assume that social human rights offer an adequate answer to this question but their content, justification and implementation are highly contested from a legal as well as philosophical point of view. Different approaches to justifying social human rights and corresponding obligations are discussed in this contribution, and it is argued that neither focussing solely on a concept of “negative” obligations nor on a concept of “positive” obligations is sufficient. Moreover, it is pointed out that it is not convincing to deny social rights the status of human rights on the grounds that they do not correspond to negative universal duties. Instead liberal rights as well as social rights are both correlated with “waves of duties,” “negative” and “positive.”