Large online platforms provide an unprecedented means for exercising freedom of expression online and wield enormous power over public participation in the online democratic space. However, it is increasingly clear that their systems, where (automated) content moderation decisions are taken based on a platformʼs terms and conditions (T&Cs), are fundamentally broken. Content moderation systems have been said to undermine freedom of expression, especially where important public interest speech ends up suppressed, such as speech by minority and marginalized groups. Indeed, these content moderation systems have been criticized for their overly vague rules of operation, inconsistent enforcement, and an overdependence on automation. Therefore, in order to better protect freedom of expression online, international human rights bodies and civil society organizations have argued that platforms “should incorporate directly” principles of fundamental rights law into their T&Cs. Under EU law, and apart from a rule in the Terrorist Content Regulation, platforms had until recently no explicit obligation to incorporate fundamental rights into their T&Cs. However, an important provision in the Digital Services Act (DSA) will change this. Crucially, Article 14 DSA lays down new rules on how platforms can enforce their T&Cs, including that platforms must have “due regard” to the “fundamental rights” of users under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. In this article, we critically examine the topic of enforceability of fundamental rights via T&Cs through the prism of Article 14 DSA. We ask whether this provision requires platforms to apply EU fundamental rights law and to what extent this may curb the power of Big Tech over online speech. We conclude that Article 14 will make it possible, in principle, to establish the indirect horizontal effect of fundamental rights in the relationship between online platforms and their users. But in order for the application and enforcement of T&Cs to take due regard of fundamental rights, Article 14 must be operationalized within the framework of the international and European fundamental rights standards. If this is possible Article 14 may fulfil its revolutionary potential.

It is a pleasure to be back in Dublin and to have this opportunity to speak to you about the Court and its future. Reading the outpourings of denigration in the newspapers recently you can be forgiven for believing that the Court is about to be towed into the middle of the Rhine and scuppered by a coalition of unhappy State Parties. So where does the future of the Court lie and how should one respond to such media buffetings?

In the liberal tradition, there has always been scepticism about the state's involvement in the activities of industry. Instead, internal measures by way of self-regulation and collective action have been preferred. In recognition of the reality that exclusive reliance on such solutions has not prevented violations of human rights, to which a high constitutional importance is attached, other arrangements have to be provided. In the system of the European Convention of Human Rights (hereinafter the Convention), positive obligations are imposed engaging the state in the active protection of human rights. The need to protect human rights against the hazards of industry has been the main issue in the case of Öneryildiz v. Turkey, in which, for the first time in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter the Court), a claim under the right to life (Article 2 of the Convention) has successfully been asserted in the context of industry.

The societal mega-trends of the past four decades, such as a globalizing economy and an aging society, have challenged the understanding of the state in OECD countries. The resulting “transformations of the state” are the subject of an interdisciplinary research agenda established at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 597 in Bremen, Germany. A total of twenty projects from political science, law, and economics explore changes of statehood which take place in two different dimensions: first, the internationalization and, second, the privatization of activities and functions which were traditionally performed by and ascribed to the democratic, constitutional and interventionist state. While the first research phase (2003-2006) aimed at founding empirical descriptions of these internationalization and privatization processes, the current phase (2007-2010) is dedicated to explaining the observed changes in statehood. Within this general framework, the authors’ research project on “New Forms of Legal Certainty in Globalized Exchange Processes” deals with changes in the institutional organization of commerce.

The aim of this casenote is to depict the essential content of the German Federal Constitutional Court's Lisbon Case. Therefore, it is of mainly descriptive nature. It primarily addresses readers wishing for a brief overview before approaching the decision itself or particularly those who might like to avoid reading the ruling in its exuberant length. In order to keep this a straightforward contribution, large parts of the judgment had to be set aside and certain necessary simplifications had to be undertaken. I acknowledge these and commend readers to the other contributions in this special collection of the German Law Journal for varied and deeper treatments of the case.

Since receiving the invitation to participate in this special issue, I have been wondering about whether I can do justice in this brief space to what I have learnt from reading Derrida. And as someone who long ago began to distrust those versions of the history of ideas organized around the names of important individuals, I've also wondered about how and why I would want to link lessons to the proper name “Jacques Derrida.” Indeed the pleasure, and even the reward, I have received from reading Derrida is hard for me to separate out from the experience of living as part of a community that exists within and across the institutions I inhabit, with colleagues, students and friends. I associate Derrida with a way of life, a way of reading, writing, speaking and listening to each other, that is part of the “simple day-to-dayness” and “the intense moments of work, teaching and thinking” that constitutes this community, that allies us. I hope I can communicate a little of what reading Derrida has meant, and still does mean, to me then within this particular institutional life.

Since the ECJ handed down the Mangold v. Rüdiger Helm (Mangold) decision in 2005, scholars have provided sometimes quite far reaching and sharp critiques of the decision and of what they took to be its consequences for European Union law. The decision concerned several questions, but the core issue was the applicability of (then) Community (now European Union) age-based anti-discrimination law in the case of a fixed-term employment contract. The contract at issue was based on a law that allowed fixed-term contracts without demanding objective reasons justifying the limitation of the period of employment beyond the age of 52. The law is enmeshed in the political problem of including people older than 52 in the workforce without depriving them of secure working conditions. The legal issue was complicated by the fact that the transposition time of the relevant directive 2000/78/EC including the prohibition of discrimination on the ground of age had not yet expired because of a permissible extension of that time by Germany. The ECJ declared the relevant norm to be contrary to Community law and thus not applicable in the case at hand. It applied the directive in question despite the still pending time limit for transposition, arguing with the requirement under Community law that Member States refrain from taking any measures liable to seriously compromise the attainment of the result prescribed by the directive. It buttressed its argument with the duty to report about the progress made during the extended transposition time. This provision was held to imply that the Member State was not allowed to adopt measures incompatible with progressive implementation. Furthermore, the ECJ interpreted the prohibition of age discrimination as an expression of a fundamental principle of Community law: the principle of equal treatment in the field of employment and occupation. Applying a proportionality test, the court found this foundational principle to have been violated. The ECJ also underlined the broad discretion the Member States retained in the field of social and employment policies. Because the provision's only criterion for allowing fixed-term contracts without an objective reason was age, without any other consideration linked to the structure of the labor market in question or of the personal situation of the person concerned, the Court found that even in light of this broad discretion, the respective norm was not appropriate and necessary to vocationally integrating unemployed older workers, which formed the purpose of the norm.

Many countries are in the process of replacing outdated sex offense regulations with laws that accurately correspond to late modern ideas about gender equality, sexual self-determination, and consensual sex. One example is Sweden, where a law that defines rape based on a criterion of nonvoluntary participation entered into force in 2018. This article analyzes the representation of rape in the new law and legal discourse in Sweden, and shows that rape is represented as a matter of choice and communication in sexual situations. Further, the new rape law is coupled to an emerging problem within such disparate spheres as public health, social media campaigns, sexual education, and gender studies; namely, the problem of sexual communication and gray zones in sexual encounters. To understand this new representation of rape, further exploration is suggested both into the effects of sexual violence being framed as a matter of individual choice, consent, and communication in late modernity and into the role of criminal law in the era of thin normativity. The article concludes that the new rape law sends a clear message about what sex should be—namely, something voluntary—but does not accurately describe the crime and the conduct that deserves criminal censure.

For a long time, EU institutions have emphasized the connection between one of the most important concepts of the integration method, mutual recognition, and the presence of mutual trust between EU Member States. Only recently, the ECJ reaffirmed in its Opinion 2/13 that mutual trust is at the heart of the EU and a “fundamental premiss” of the European legal structure. But can law really restore, advance or even govern by trust? This question is crucial for the EU of today, which finds itself in the midst of a severe crisis of trust. For the EU as a community “based on the rule of law” generating trust through law might seem the natural, maybe the only politically viable response to a crisis of trust. Nevertheless, even if one agrees that the rule of law requires people to place trust in legal rules, and that courts and administrative agencies need to trust each other in order to work efficiently and consistently, how would legal rules be able to generate or promote trust? Moreover, isn't it deeply rooted in our ideas about constitutional government that democratic law must institutionalize mutual distrust rather than govern by trust? These conceptual and normative objections did not stop the European Union from pursuing the project of trust-building through law in one of the most sensitive areas of EU law, judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters. This Article will ask whether the project to promote trust through law is a promising one, and, eventually, how to reinterpret statutory provisions and legal principles that purport to generate trust amongst their addressees.

Against the backdrop of an evolving landscape describing data driven research, this article discusses the role of data protection laws in shaping a free flow of research data. In particular, the analysis inquires whether European data protection law hampers or encourages data-driven research. The analysis critically challenges the shared belief that the more severe data protection regime laid down by the European legislator adversely affects data flows and with that data-driven research. This is contrary to what occurs in the United States, where the more fragmented and less developed data protection framework facilitates data flows and related innovation patterns. We show how research objectives through data re-usability have been very recently given primary importance in the GDPR, where they find a formidable ally enabling the re-usability of public data by businesses and of private data by public institutions, for either public interest-related research purposes or commercially oriented innovation purposes. We argue that the GDPR differently promotes research-valuable data flows in consistency with an emerging principle of free movement of personal data. In order to ground this statement, our analysis links to this principle three-directional research regimes emerging from the GDPR.

In this study, I examine the interpretive practice of the Hungarian Constitutional Court. The two-decade history of the Court gives sufficient experience to survey the methods of constitutional review employed by the Court. My analysis will concentrate on the period of 1990–2010, because the general elections of 2010 brought about essential changes not only in Hungarian constitutionalism, but in the Court's life too. The Constitutional Court, losing its independence and a substantial part of its earlier powers, will presumably not be the same anymore.

Judges involved in constitutional adjudication often engage in comparative analyses of foreign cases. The judges of South Africa's Constitutional Court [hereinafter Constitutional Court] do so, too. The phenomenon has been given many names such as “transjudicialism,” “transjudicial communication,” “constitutionalist dialogue,” “judicial globalization,” “constitutional cross-fertilization,” “transnational contextualization,” “globalization of judgment,” “globalization of national courts,” “constitutional borrowing,” “constitutional comparativism,” and “judicial comparativism.” All these terms have merit, especially within their appropriate context, but for the purposes of this contribution we will use the term “comparative constitutional jurisprudence” to name the phenomenon we wish to describe and discuss. First, in the South African context, the terms “dialogue,” “cross-fertilization,” and “globalization” do not reflect the true nature of the exercises in drawing comparisons in the South African Constitutional Court. These terms imply a reciprocal dialogue between two or more courts from different jurisdictions. It is evident, however, that the South African Constitutional Court has been considering far more foreign jurisprudence than any non-South African constitutional court has been considering South African jurisprudence—in other words, this has largely been a case of one-way traffic. S v. Makwanyane, in many ways the inaugural decision of the Constitutional Court, contains 220 foreign case citations from 11 countries and three supranational courts. To our knowledge no other foreign court can boast a comparable statistic.

Gustav Lambert Radbruch (1878-1949) and Hermann Kantorowicz (1877-1940) were undoubtedly two of the greatest legal scholars in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century; for some of this time arguably the greatest. It is a happy coincidence that they both attended the seminar of the criminologist Franz von Liszt in Berlin at the same time in 1903. Although very different in temperament and not always in agreement, they were immediately drawn to each other, highly respectful of each other's undoubted intellect, never jealous of the other's achievements but always altruistically supportive. Though together for only four months initially, they maintained regular contact through letters and quickly forged a close and life long friendship.

As my work has argued previously, European integration enjoys an “administrative, not constitutional” legitimacy. This view is in obvious tension with the deeply-rooted conceptual framework—what we might call the “constitutional, not international” perspective—that has dominated the public-law scholarship of European integration over many decades. Although the alternative presented in my work breaks from that traditional perspective, we should not view it as an all-or-nothing rejection of everything that has come before it. The administrative alternative can be seen, rather, as providing legal-historical micro-foundations for certain theories that also emerged out of the traditional perspective even as they too are in tension with it. I am referring in particular to Joseph Weiler's classic notion of European “equilibrium”—now updated as “constitutional tolerance”—as well as Kalypso Nicolaïdis's more recently developed theory of European “demoi-cracy” on which this article focuses in particular. The central idea behind the “administrative, not constitutional” interpretation—the historical-constructivist principal-agent framework rooted in delegation, as well as the balance demanded between supranational regulatory power and national democratic and constitutional legitimacy— directly complements both theories. The administrative alternative suggests how the relationship between national principals and supranational agents is one of “mediated legitimacy” rather than direct control. It has its origins in the evolution of administrative governance in relation to representative government over the course of the twentieth century (indeed before). By drawing on the normative lessons of that history—notably the need for some form of national oversight as well as enforcement of outer constraints on supranational delegation in order to preserve national democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a recognizable sense—this article serves an additional purpose. It suggests how theories of European equilibrium and demoi-cracy might be translated into concrete legal proposals for a more sustainable form of integration over time—a pressing challenge in the context of the continuing crisis of European integration.

For quite some time the question of how to cope with violations of international humanitarian law was primarily one of individual criminal responsibility. However, over the last few years, the position of the victims of armed conflict has increasingly come into focus. In particular, attention has been given to the issue of reparations, including compensation, for breaches of international humanitarian law.

Constitutional patriotism is on the ascent among contemporary constitutional theories. Its objective is to re-orient the loyalty of citizens away from particularistic attachment to a Nation, and towards the Constitution. In promoting political justice, constitutional patriotism relies on citizens’ acceptance of a particular constitutional order not as an embodiment of particularistic ethnocultural, or even statist values, but rather as an expression of universal political principles. In other words, a constitutional order ought not to be seen as an instrument for a nation's political self-actualization, but rather as a framework for institutions and a repository of values that enable a diverse body of citizens to critically rework their particular traditions in light of universalist principles of political justice.

Institutions can have a decisive impact on economic performance. The law is particularly important in shaping the institutional framework for economic activities. Legal rules can be viewed as socio-technological devices used to help individuals solve the coordination problems and conflicts that arise in an environment of scarce resources. In such an environment, the law affects both the allocation as well as the distribution of resources, and is itself influenced and altered by economic evolution. However, our understanding of the determinants and mechanisms of legal change from an economic perspective remains rather weak.

The desire to prevent prenatal and preconceptual harm has led to a call for more legal protection for unborn and future children. This Article analyzes the way in which the Dutch legal system has responded to this call by identifying and critically scrutinizing two strategies employed in this response. First, to protect the unborn child from maternal harm, the concept of legal personality has been expanded to include the unborn child, albeit only the viable fetus. This strategy is criticized because its measures are presented as if they follow directly from the existing legal framework, whereas these measures are in fact based on several obscured assumptions and, therefore, bring to bear a new perspective on the concept of legal personality. The second strategy is applied to the future child. Instead of expanding an existing category, a new category is created to offer the future child a place within the law. The future child is addressed as the subject of legal relevant interests instead of rights. Although this strategy seems promising, it still faces difficulties when applied to the future child, which presumably has an interest in non-existence.

More than any other EU institution, the Court of Justice of the European Union has upheld the presumption of mutual trust in EU criminal law cooperation. Surprisingly though, despite mutual trust’s centrality in the Court’s jurisprudence, it has long not qualified nor properly elaborated the notion of trust, but rather held on to its presumed existence based on a high level of fundamental rights protection throughout the Union. This article will assess the important role of the Court in establishing, upholding and ultimately qualifying the trust presumption in the EU criminal justice context. Along the lines of a number of key cases, the narrative of a strong defence of (the presumption of) mutual trust appears, but also of an evolution toward more room for rebuttal in recent cases. This signals the increased weight given to fundamental rights protection in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.

On the 30 June 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, FCC) has passed its long-awaited decision on the compatibility of the Act approving the Treaty of Lisbon and the accompanying legislation with the Basic law (Grundgesetz). The FCC's decision according to which the ratification law is compatible with the Basic law was greeted with relief by many German and European policy makers. It has removed another obstacle for the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon in the European Union (EU), which still has to be ratified by Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic, though. But also Germany's ratification still depends on the amendment of the accompanying “Act Extending and Strengthening the Rights of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat in European Union Matters” (“Extending Act”) which the FCC has declared incompatible with the Basic law insofar as the legislature, Bundestag and Bundesrat, have not been accorded sufficient rights of participation in European law-making and treaty amendment procedures. The FCC has therefore ruled that the Federal Republic of Germany's instrument of ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon may not be deposited as long as the constitutionally required legal elaboration of the parliamentary rights of participation has not entered into force. This puts pressure on German law-makers to amend the accompanying “Extending Act” possibly before the referendum in Ireland and before German elections in autumn 2009.