The territory of the European Union is made up of a rich and wide-ranging universe of languages. The European Union contains a wealth of languages. In its current form there are more than 60 autochthonous languages in the 27 Member States, with widely differing situations and legal statuses. The principal characteristic of the European linguistic diversity is the great heterogeneity of situations and internal legal statuses that the european languages display. Most of the languages of EU are spoken by very few people and few languages are enormously widespread. There are many languages in the EU, which, in spite of having an appreciable number of speakers, do not have official recognition. And there are languages that are co-official or have some sort of official recognition in some areas, but struggle to survive. Multilingualism is one of the defining characteristics of the EU, and it is worth examining how EU law deals with it.

This Article aims at presenting and clarifying the Polish perspective towards the Mediterranean refugee crisis. Poland has not been directly affected by this crisis so far and this makes the Polish case significantly different from the European Union Member States that are directly affected by a large influx of people seeking protection. This Article briefly presents the Polish legal framework and its origins and analyzes the particular governmental (in)actions towards the Mediterranean refugee crisis, including references to the politicized debate on the issue. Also, the specific context of a potential future Ukrainian crisis is addressed. The Article finishes with concluding remarks and suggestions to employ temporary legal measures to address large movements of refugees and migrants, as such measures deal with the specificity of such movements in the best way that can be achieved.

This Article compares the French and Italian experiences with gender quotas—understood as mechanisms intended to increase women's participation in public life, including but not limited to, the reservation of seats in certain positions and the modulation of electoral lists— in public entities such as legislative and executive bodies (including political parties), the judiciary, and public universities. The comparison between France and Italy demonstrates that even between two countries whose constitutional history and trajectory with regard to gender quotas has been portrayed as being essentially identical, a closer analysis of the recent developments in both countries’ constitutional and administrative case law shows a slightly more nuanced picture. Using Rodolfo Sacco's approach of legal formants, this Article argues that the difference stems mainly from the different attitude and interpretation of equality by the judicial formant.

This introduction lays out the rationale behind the special issue examining Böckenförde's concepts and arguments in light of contemporary crises of democracy. Considering the enormous challenges facing democracies today, how should one judge Böckenförde's optimistic view of the regulatory capabilities of the state? Is it irrelevant, given the de facto power of both supra- and non-state actors? Or does Böckenförde's view still possess explanatory value, as the state remains the most important political unit? The article consists of two parts. First, Böckenförde will be introduced as a thinker whose work centred on questions of statism, liberalism and secularism. He paid special attention to the relation between politics and religion in contexts of democratic statehood. In addition to his interest in these themes, his understanding of the constitution and constitutional interpretation will be sketched. Second, we will introduce the three topoi on which the articles of this special issue focus: Böckenförde's insistence that the state of exception ought to be constitutionalised by exploring the relevance of this proposition in four different jurisdictions; whether his model of democratic secularism as open encompassing neutrality can serve as a useful starting point to manage religious and social diversity; the future of Europe. Against this backdrop, the conclusion then aims to connect Böckenförde's ideas on relative homogeneity with the contemporary crises of democracy.

On December 12, 2000, the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) issued its judgment concerning the controversial “shock” advertising campaign of the Italian fashion designer and retailer United Colors of Benetton. Momentaufnahme reported on the oral arguments before the FCC. (No. 3/2000 - Nov. 15, 2000). The Second Senate of the FCC found the 1995 decisions of the Federal Court of Justice (FCJ), which upheld bans on the Benetton advertisements, to be unconstitutional because the bans constituted an infringement of the constitutionally protected right to freely express one's opinion. The Benetton marketing campaign used large format photography depicting provocative issues, including: a duck smothered in oil, apparently from an oil-spill; children being exploited as laborers in a third-world factory; and a naked buttock bearing the stamp “H.I.V. Positive.” Publication of the Benetton advertisements had been challenged as “unfair competition” by a leading consumer protection group (Zentrale zur Bekämpfung unlauteren Wettbewerbs e.V., Bad Homburg).

While the Dublin System was meant to create a clear and fair division of responsibilities for the examination of applications for international protection, the recent refugee crisis highlighted the extent to which normative aspirations and political realities can diverge. That said, the Dublin System does allow for a certain degree of flexibility: By exercising the discretionary right to assume responsibility under the so-called “sovereignty clause” of Article 17, paragraph 1 of the Dublin III Regulation, Member States can examine asylum applications even when they would not formally have jurisdiction for doing so according to the criteria established by the Dublin System. Germany has relied upon this right extensively during the refugee crisis. Against this backdrop, the following contribution analyzes the reasons for, and limits of, multilevel administrative discretion in the Common European Asylum System. It argues that when a Member State exercises the right to assume responsibility in a sweeping manner, i.e. in hundreds of thousands of cases, it runs the risk of overstretching the legal limits of its discretionary powers. National administrative bodies can only invoke the right to assume responsibility insofar as this does not amount to game-changing decisions by the executive or unilateral decision-making without transnational coordination – particularly when such decisions have severe transnational consequences.

The Common European Asylum System constitutes one of the principal areas in which the fundamental rights of individuals are essentially placed in competition with the core principle of mutual confidence and the need to preserve the effectiveness of EU law. That competitive relationship becomes particularly evident when applicants for international protection rely on alleged violations of their fundamental rights in order to contest their transfer to the Member State that is normally responsible for examining their asylum request according to the criteria of the Dublin III Regulation. The balancing process that needs to be carried out in this respect and the measure of the monitoring obligation that EU law imposes on the receiving Member State regarding the protection of the fundamental rights of asylum seekers are well exemplified by the preliminary ruling in Jawo. That case provides additional clarification regarding the circumstances in which the protection of fundamental rights may introduce exceptions to the principle of mutual trust. At the same time, it illustrates the inherent tensions that exist between the protection of fundamental rights and the application of the principle of mutual confidence.

In December 2018, the Euro Summit endorsed the Term Sheet on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) reform prepared by the Eurogroup. In this context, the Euro Summit did not acknowledge the proposal of the European Commission to transform the ESM into the European Monetary Fund (EMF), but simply gave the Eurogroup a mandate to draft the relevant amendments to the ESM Treaty and submit them to the European Council of June 2019. Nonetheless, the justifications for the incorporation of the ESM into the body of the European Treaties continue to be valid and may come back into play. In this respect, it is worth highlighting two flaws that have emerged in the proposed transformation of the ESM into the EMF. First, the ESM Treaty does not contain any rule about extinction and transfer of functions. Second, the Commission’s proposal did not clarify what status the EMF would have enjoyed in the EU legal framework.

This essay deals with the topic of director & officer liability for the dissemination of false information in Germany in the form of ad-hoc disclosures. From the perspective of an American trained attorney, it is surprising to note that there is, to date, very little – quite possibly zero – real personal civil liability in this area for directors & officers of publicly traded companies, however limited criminal sanctions do exist. The essay discusses the lawmaking which is underway in Germany to increase civil liability. After a review of the laws which govern the dissemination of false information, the essay reviews five German cases: Infomatec, EM.TV, Metabox, Comroad and Deutsche Telekom as examples of cases where criminal sanctions for management appear to be much more likely than civil liability.

Since December 18, 2014, when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its notorious Opinion 2/13, the conclusions of the Court have been a subject of numerous analyzes and debates—often sharp in their criticism. Now that the content of the Opinion seems fairly elucidated, the scholarly attention should turn towards searching for practical solutions to the CJEU's demands. This Article aims to provide a list of possible solutions to each requirement of the Opinion and assessing their pros and cons. Instead of concentrating on the obstacles posed by the Court, it is incumbent to address the problems with innovative legal thinking and save the project of the EU acceding to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

In the last week of February 2008, the University Assistants of Public Law from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came together in Heidelberg for their annual conference to discuss “Security, Freedom and (the) Public(ity).” A better date for the meeting could not have been chosen; on the day the conference started, the German Constitutional Court declared online searches by German intelligence agencies to be unconstitutional and came up with a new dimension of human rights protection for the privacy of computer network systems. This pathbreaking jurisprudence was omnipresent at the conference; it had already been in the opening-speech by Justice Brun-Otto Bryde (Gießen), a member of the First Senate of the Constitutional Court, which was to render its decision the very next day. It was brought up in numerous discussions during the conference and it was the main topic on the panel discussion with Paul Kirchhof (Heidelberg), a former Justice in the same Senate who was known as the “Professor from Heidelberg” during Angela Merkel's 2006 election campaign, and Fredrik Roggan, a Berlin lawyer and chairman of the civil rights association “Humanistische Union,” who argued the case before the Court. Perhaps it was all a coincidence, but questions of freedom and security have remained on the everyday agenda, in a political context as well as constitutional debates, ever since September 11, 2001.

During the last few decades scholars have discussed various different scenarios of modern terrorism. One of these scenarios –– Islamic motivated terrorism –– came to light with the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Another scenario discussed involves terrorist attacks against the natural environment as part of so-called “eco-terrorism”. These attacks are either carried out using traditional weapons or the often-discussed “bioterrorism”, where biological weapons are manufactured and misused by terrorists.

This short essay seeks to introduce the phenomenological approach to law and legal decision-making, and to show the role of emotion in guiding the person applying the law. The peculiarity of the phenomenological approach-which substantially refers to the principles of Kantian epistemology-is found in the philosophical analysis of perception: Perception itself contains a specific emotional competence for evaluation, which will be disclosed to the legal context. In this context, phenomena, i.e., the contents that we perceive through our acts of perception, will be exposed as a basis for ethical decisions. Typically, when questions of legal interpretation call forth conflicts between core ethical values, it appears that the competence of a primary, intuitive judgment strongly forms our decision-making process. The phenomenological approach will thus point out the openness of a legal system towards criteria of extra-legal value judgment. Furthermore, this approach will reveal legal practitioners’ emotional competences for judgment as a source of normativity. An emotional ability to judge will finally be-in a series of examples-referred to as the last instance on our quest for justice.

Between the relics of a nation state past and the promises of a transnational future, the normative evolution of the European Union has rightly been described as “an international legal experiment.” Europeanization, in that sense, has been construed as an experimental legal mode for the integration of national economic diversity through harmonized regulation. Even though the European Union's operating code has remained decisively economic, the normative matrix itself has transcended the historical objective of economic homogeneity. European integration therefore experienced a normative turn after the completion of the single market; the European Union progressively captured the social space of the continent, evolving into a societal experiment of normative imagination and cultural plurality, taking it beyond economic integration, market freedoms, and monetary stability.

Factortame (Case C-213/89 [1990] ECR I-2433, starting in 1988, ff.) was the case that Eurosceptics felt doomed UK parliamentary sovereignty. Factortame said that, having committed itself to the treaty, a Member State could not then contradict the treaty with contrary domestic action. Specifically, no discrimination against nationality (now TFEU Art. 18) has been permitted since the beginning. Nevertheless, parliament amended the Merchant Shipping Act in 1988 to prevent Spanish fishermen from catching fish in UK waters by requiring, for example, that 75% of the shares in a fishing enterprise must owned by people domiciled and residing in UK. The diehards never accepted that parliament had to exercise its authority within the framework established by the treaty.

This paper critically explores how to implement changes to corporate behavior in regard to labor-related issues through codes of conduct (“code” or “codes”) that would strengthen the rights of workers. The corporation essentially allows for its own reformation from within. There are many ways the link between corporate governance or corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) and workers' rights can be explored. The term CSR is used to differentiate from the alternate shareholder primacy model of a corporation existing solely for its shareholders and to increase profit. It stands for the idea that corporations have duties to other stakeholders beyond shareholders. Those stakeholders include, but are not limited to, employees and those who produce goods and provide services, environmental agencies, and government. Codes are a soft law mechanism that may be used to create a voluntary standard or set of rules to which corporations are bound. While this may be viewed as rather insubstantial compared to legislation, codes have value in terms of allowing the two (or more) parties that are bound by the code to have direct input in drafting the code. While the inherent imbalance of power involved in the dynamics of the employment relationship between management and workers must be acknowledged and must have an impact on the creation of the code, it does allow for involvement at a level which legislation does not. Part two of this paper examines governance models, Part three discusses codes of conduct as a private regulatory framework, and Part four shows how monitoring agencies are used to ensure compliance with codes.

Food law in the European Community is a touchy subject. One of the big ongoing debates in this area centres on the question of what names we call our foodstuffs by. In an internal market where local supermarket shelves are stocked with products coming from all around the EC and beyond, how can we be sure that the contents of the packets conform to our connotations of the name on the label? For example, if it says “chocolate” on the label, how can we be sure that it really is “chocolate” within our understanding of the word? The question of what names can or should go on labels is, sadly, very complicated. This article therefore intends to look at only one aspect of this problem: when a Member State is allowed to insist that the name of an imported “generic” product be changed. We will begin by briefly looking at the case law and one of the major pieces of legislation in this area – the Labelling Directive – before going on to discuss application of the law to the recent Chocolate Cases, handed down by the European Court of Justice (hereafter the “Court”) at the beginning of this year. This discussion will give some (hopefully) interesting insights into the way in which primary law, as interpreted by the Court, and secondary legislation interact and into the balancing of consumer protection and free trade performed by the Court.