As is well known, both the drafting and the anticipated ratification of the draft Constitutional Treaty were surrounded by a lively debate. The communicative spectacle created by the “Convention on the Future of Europe” and its ambitious plan to draw up a European constitution served as the major attractors. The debate was conducted, of course, in different settings and at several levels. What interests me here, though, is that the public and the academic debate emphasised different aspects of the overall project.

On 27 November 2003 a political agreement has been reached in the Council on the compromise proposal for the Takeover bids Directive. On 16 December, the Parliament gave its approval and the proposal has still to receive the formal voting of the Council under the Irish Presidency in March 2004. Member States are required to transpose it into national law by 2006. The Directive regulates how a company or an investor that already has control in a listed company or seeks to obtain control can acquire securities in that company and applies to both voluntary and mandatory bids.

In February 2010, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) issued a ruling on the so-called “Hartz IV legislation.” The ruling dealt with the law on social benefits according to the Second Book of the German Code of Social Law and was based on the “fundamental right to the guarantee of a subsistence minimum” derived from the declaration of human dignity in Article 1(1) of the German Basic Law in conjunction with Article 20(1), the principle of the social welfare state.

The European Court of Human Rights, on 30 June 2005, handed down its long awaited judgment in the case Bosphorus Hava Yollari Turizm v. Ireland. The case concerned the responsibility of contracting parties for legal measures induced by the European Community.

Emergencies are exceptions to the rule. Laws that respond to emergencies can create exceptions to rules that protect human rights. In long lasting emergencies, these exceptions can become the rule, diluting human rights and eroding the rule of law. In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted states to change rules governing commercial and personal activities to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Many governors’ executive orders were challenged as violations of the constitutionally protected rights of those affected. Judges are deciding whether emergencies can justify more restrictions than would be permitted in normal circumstances and whether some rights deserve more protection than others, even in an emergency. This article analyzes ongoing litigation involving emergency restrictions on religious freedom and access to reproductive health services. These cases suggest that some judges are altering the standards of judicial review of the state’s emergency powers in ways that could permanently strengthen some rights and dilute others in normal circumstances.

This article examines the specific issue of the referendum as an instrument in the reordering of territory, specifically in the context of the secession of Crimea from Ukraine. The article maps how in recent decades independence referendums have proliferated and considers how the Crimean situation exposes the deep pathology of uncertainty in international law and its understanding of self-determination, exposing the referendum as a dangerous outlier. The principle of democracy, present already in the context of Kosovo's unilateral independence, and which forced the hand of Canada and the UK to accommodate secessionist aspirations, is a growing feature of international legal discourse, and one which suggests that the referendum is likely to remain a potential trump card to which nationalists will appeal to overcome both constitutional impediments and the black hole of international law in the path toward statehood.

In 1976, MGM released Network, a satirical film about a news anchor (played by Peter Finch) so frustrated by the state of the television industry and by society in general that he couldn't stop himself from lashing out in the midst of an evening broadcast. He was “mad as hell”, and it was with this impassioned rage and his everyman sensibilities that he was determined to move the television watching nation. Nevertheless, for all his conviction, Finch's character was destined to fail. In the penultimate scene of the film, Finch is confronted by the television network's chairman of the board (played by Ned Beatty).

During the last few years, agency work has received heightened legislative attention in Europe, on an EU level as well as on national level, since the early 1990s. This interest was spurred by the relative growth of the sector as well as by the hope that agency work might offer solutions to unemployment by providing enhanced flexibility. As a result, agency work is no longer considered as a form of employment to be shunned, but has gained in acceptance. This article undertakes to analyse the legislative development towards acceptance of agency work by comparing the EU approach with the German approach. Over and above the specific issue of agency work, the question whether needs for flexibility of employers and employees are capable of being reconciled by recourse to new methods of organising work and what regulatory policy is most likely to achieve this, forms a background to our considerations.

After giving an overview of the definition of agency work with a specific reference to the inherent risks and the potential of enhancing flexibility and resulting regulatory approaches, we will consider the EU strategy on regulating agency work, especially within the conceptual framework of the EU employment policy. The next step is to analyse the German case with reference to the historical development of the approach towards agency work and an analysis of the latest legislative reform and its practical consequences. The conclusion assesses whether the German legislation complies with the draft directive, which national peculiarities shape its practical effects and what recommendations may be referred for the final version of the draft EU directive.

This contribution analyzes how the process of European integration has affected the capacity of citizens to collectively decide on the “social question,” that is, on the distribution of resources and life chances between individuals in a society. It starts by highlighting the pivotal role of “the political” in any answer to such question (B); generally traces the demise of this role under the pressures of globalization, legal integration, and the sovereign debt crisis (C); and suggests that law has been an important instrument for the lifting of the social question outside the scope of political contestation. This contribution then briefly catalogues different alternatives that can serve to reappropriate the social question within the realm of politics, argues that our priority should lie in the formation of a transnational public sphere, and suggests that EU law can, in several ways, contribute towards, if not fully deliver, a return of authorship and ownership about how societies function to the citizen (D).

In 2016, the German parliament changed the law on sexual assault and rape (Sect. 177 StGB). The new law assumes a “no-means-no”-model, while the old law required coercion as a necessary feature of rape and other forms of sexual assaults. In addition, two new offense descriptions were introduced: sexual harassment (Sect. 184i StGB) and offenses out of groups (Sect. 184j StGB). In this Article, I describe the deficiencies of the old law, the process of law reform, and the newly enacted prohibitions.

There are few cases in the law of corporate groups that have provoked as much interest, applause and critique as the Holzmüller decision of the Federal Supreme Court. On February 25, 1982, the 2nd Zivilsenat (Chamber of civil cases) of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH – Federal Court of Justice), the highest court with assigned competences for company law, adopted what would later be known as the Holzmüller doctrine. Since then the Holzmüller case has influenced the course of countless shareholders’ meetings, been relied on in numerous shareholder actions and has initiated intensive academical as well as practical debate. What is it all about? At the core, Holzmüller deals with the balance of power between the Hauptversammlung (shareholders’ meeting) and the Vorstand (board of directors) of a German Aktiengesellschaft (AG – stock corporation) within the context of corporate groups. Practically, the protection of minority shareholders of a corporate group's parent company is a major underlying issue.

Many industrial practices, such as the organization of working conditions or the use of hazardous substances, are no longer endemic to a specific jurisdiction. Rather, they spread through cross-border production chains or global markets for consumer products. In many cases, such regulatory issues therefore cannot be resolved within a single territory. Instead, they require the involvement of global players, such as civil society, business actors or international organizations, who can often find pragmatic solutions to global problems, even if they lack the formal authority to do so. This seems to conform to a more global trend of national government getting replaced by global governance.

I develop my picture of contemporary legal scholarship in two broad strokes. In the first section, I focus on the relationship between legal scholarship and the traditions of theory, philosophy, and the human sciences, arguing that the interdisciplinary work of contemporary legal scholarship expresses legal culture's uneasiness about intellection. In the second section, I focus on the relationship between legal scholarship and political engagement, arguing that the programatic or exhortatory tone, structure and context of contemporary legal scholarship expresses legal culture's uneasiness about what it thinks of as “politics”.

On 11 January 2013 the German quality newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported about the effects of introducing the new unisex insurance tariffs mandated by a decision of the European Court of Justice on 1 March 2011. The result is summarized in the headline: “Für alle teurer” (“More expensive for all”). According to a study the leveling of gender specific risks led to largely insignificant benefits for the former disadvantaged sex but to partially dramatic rises of the premium of those who were formerly considered better risks. The insurance industry which has been operating a dual structure since 21 December 2012 is considered to be the winner of the legal change.

The Ukraine crisis has, yet again, called into question the coherence and stability of international law both as a language for mediating particular types of international disputes—such as conflicts between the so-called Great Powers— and as a set of institutions capable of serving as fora for the resolution of these disputes. Given the scale and intensity of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the magnitude of its regional and global repercussions, a number of policymakers and historians have already made compelling arguments for why the conflict may be the most significant threat to global order since the end of the Cold War—perhaps even since the Cuban Missile Crisis. While policymakers in the U.S. and Russia have cautioned against drawing Cold War parallels, numerous analysts in both countries have proclaimed the start of a new Cold War in light of the rapid deterioration in relations between Moscow and Washington. Beyond bilateral U.S.–Russia relations, and in the words of Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Cold War Two (hereinafter “CWII”) has “effectively put an end to the interregnum of [post-Cold War] partnership and cooperation between the West and Russia.” While sharing the view that a new Cold War has erupted, this article suggest that its causes are far deeper and its likely battlegrounds are far wider than mere antagonism between the United States and Russia over the fate of Ukraine, To the extent that CWII has begun, it may mark a return to interbloc rivalry, East versus West, or even Great Game geopolitics. To complement these frames, the present conflict may also be understood by viewing it through the prism of political economy, particularly the study of “new-statism,” or the new developmental state within the broader context of the development of global capitalism. Thinking of CWII this way allows one to ask whether CWII is actually a war between Western liberal capitalism and various systems of state capitalism, of which Russia's is but one. To be even more precise, one can also ask whether the conflict is better thought of as a contest between different state capitalisms for control over key trade or transit routes, production locales, and markets. Tribes, states, and empires have always waged mortal combat over these material matters. CWII—whether it has started or soon will—will likely rest on similar considerations. And yet, despite the seriousness of the threat, there has been remarkably little academic discussion, and much less public debate, regarding the configuration of global power flows that has contributed to this crisis or the role, and limitations of law in structuring our political imaginations in response to these challenges. This Article is an attempt to call attention to several serious aspects of the Ukraine crisis which have hitherto been underanalyzed, namely the role of information warfare in exacerbating its magnitude.

The European continent has become a space of constitutional interdependence and consequently, national Constitutional Courts are now embedded in a constitutional fabric made of national constitutions, European Union (EU) law, European treaties, and conventions. This is all the more evident in the domain of fundamental rights.

The institutional design of the Strasbourg system that has evolved over the last decades is an expression of contemporary debates surrounding the system's very nature and purpose. The current debate primarily bears on the range of choices that the Council of Europe faces in adapting to the changes in Europe, which largely have been caused by its expansion to cover nearly all post-Communist States of Central and Eastern Europe since the 1990s. This expansion, and with it the extension of the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) to now more than 800 million people in forty seven countries, has confronted the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) with a far broader range of human rights problems than had previously existed. By 2010, the number of pending cases had risen to 139,650 but the Court's adjudicative capacity remains limited.

While the “essence” of EU fundamental rights has received much attention following the CJEU’s Schrems decision, the concept of “essence” remains much less examined in international human rights law. Nonetheless, a concept of “essence” for human rights can also be found in international law. This Article discusses different aspects of the “essence” concept in international human rights law, namely non-derogability, non-restrictability, and minimum core, in three steps. First, the Article looks at civil political rights and socioeconomic rights separately and identifies two different approaches to the concept of essence for each of the two categories: While for civil and political rights the concept of essence is mainly linked to the notions of non-derogability and non-restrictability, for socioeconomic rights, the concept refers mainly to the states’ obligation to guarantee an essential level of protection independent of their resource limitations. Second, the Article continues by reading the two approaches together and identifies certain elements of an overarching “essence” concept. Finally, the Article discusses the relationship between the CJEU’s “essence” jurisprudence and the related concepts in international law and concludes with two theses: First, international law deserves more attention when reflecting on the EU’s concept of essence. It equally employs concepts of “essence” and also informs the development and interpretation of EU law. Second, when engaging with the question of whether the EU law should draw lessons from its international counterpart on the notion of “essence,” one must contemplate drawbacks for EU law that the concept has presented for international law.