Established in the wake of the Nice Treaty debacle by the December 2001 European Council Laeken Summit, the Convention on the future of Europe is a radical political experiment. The Convention has been meeting in Brussels under the chairmanship of ex-heads of state Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Giuliano Amato and Jean-Luc Dehaene since February this year. It combines a novel political formula with an immense open-ended remit. Its 105 members represent the governments and parliaments of the EU15 and of the 13 candidate accession states, and the European Parliament. For the first time national parliaments and the European Parliament are sitting jointly with governments. This is also the first occasion on which the accession states have participated as equals in the EU (technically they are non-voting, but consensus is the aim). The Convention takes its mandate from the Laeken Declaration, which proclaims that “the Union stands at a cross-roads.” The complexity, juxtaposition and inter-relation of the questions which the Declaration raises, and the urgent historic decisions which accompany these – as well as explicit expectations from many quarters – earn the Convention the label ‘constitutional'. Media and academic comment alike favour comparisons with the 1787 Philadelphia constitutional convention – neither a recent nor a local precedent (but one with obvious additional appeal for the Euro-federalist tendency). A more empirical reference is the Convention that drafted the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. For a recent survey of the Convention's progress see The Economist.

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.”

During the last few years the German courts have had to face several cases in which companies — especially from the IT-sector — filed lawsuits against “headhunters.” “Headhunters” in this context are (usually) executive consultants who try to poach personnel from other companies by simply calling them and asking whether or not they want to change companies. Since skilled and qualified workers and employees are desperately but often unsuccessfully searched by innumerable German companies on the domestic and most recently also the European and international job-market, the methods of poaching have reached and sometimes crossed the borders of unfair practices. The courts faced with these cases had to draw these borders, a process this article attempts to outline.

These are exciting times for European private law. After many years of research the publication of the Draft Common Frame of Reference in the form of the interim outline edition of 2008 and, in particular, of the Outline Edition in 2009, is set to change the landscape of legal education in private law. Although many universities are likely to continue a traditional curriculum based on national law, possibly with comparative influences, for some universities this will be an occasion to move from a comparative to more truly European curriculum. The change to a European-based curriculum is controversial in legal education as the need to train nationally qualified lawyers remains. However, there are some experiences with the setting up of a European-based curriculum that might demonstrate a possibility of how to do this.

On February 16th, 2004 the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) delivered a judgment concerning stock options for members of the supervisory board of Mobilcom AG, a major German telecommunications company organized as a stock corporation. As is well known, German stock corporations have a two-tier board, consisting of the management board and the supervisory board. This decision by the BGH sheds again a new light on the much discussed and much disputed management structure of German stock corporations. After this decision, there are now only limited ways in which members of the supervisory board may be compensated with stock options, if at all. In the near future, even these possibilities might be foreclosed by new regulation. The following comment will give a brief overview of the case, the reasoning of the Court, the law as it stands, and finally the law as it might become.

Whether or not we have ourselves studied the philosophy of law, most of us are familiar with the fact that philosophical debate concerning the nature of law has been around since Ancient Greece. In much the same way, there have been long-running philosophical debates concerning justice, truth, reason and a host of other issues. The debate concerning law is in some respects different, however. For it is not too difficult to see how the nature of justice or truth or reason could give rise to a specifically philosophical debate, while it is far from clear why the nature of law should generate any philosophical puzzlement at all.

EU Member States have in recent years designed national schemes to support the development of renewable energy. For example, in systems of feed-in-tariffs the states guarantee for a given period of time plants generating electricity from renewable resources the market price plus a premium. These feed-in-tariffs have normally only been awarded to electricity generated in-state. The preference given to in-state industry has been challenged in court as contradicting the principle non-discrimination on the European internal market. The decision by national legislatures to limit the availability of feed-in-tariffs to electricity generated in-state, however, has—to the surprise of many—been found justifiable by the European Court of Justice. This Article illustrates how the objective to ensure system stability has emerged as the strongest ground of justification in the context of cross-border electricity trade and how similar arguments have actually been used previously in the context of the health care service sector. While the reasoning of the court is defendable, the court could have developed an even more nuanced and informative position if it had taken notice of additional aspects that have popped up in the U.S. debate on similar questions.

“Our Constitution … is called democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the greatest number.” This statement by Thukydides preceded the preamble of the draft constitutional treaty elaborated by the European Convention. Although not adopted by the intergovernmental conference, the proposed introduction illustrates that the Convention intended to attribute a central role to the concept of democracy – at least symbolically.

In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus becomes a prisoner of inevitability, existentially condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for the sake of seeing it roll back down immediately. His sense of desperation and futility is reminiscent of Europe today. It has become a prisoner of the circularity of stabilizing inherently unstable markets. And each cycle exacerbates the dominance of the economic over the political, the erosion of democratic paradigms, the indifference of citizens, and the divorce between social reality and its political translation. Political discourse is suspended while “technocrats” redistribute societal resources and aspirations in the name of economic necessity. And we, the Europeans, are sidelined and numbed by the repetitive talk of austerity and economic stability, EFSF and ESM, financial leverage and institutional reforms. All presented as inevitable for the health of the market, as a bitter medicine required to cease the pain. Needless to say, it will not; the pain is systemic.

I would like to address the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the perspective of its past, its present and its future. Where did this institution come from and why? It was the first Court to provide the opportunity to an individual to sue his government before an international tribunal although the initial expectation was that it would be State parties that policed each other under the system established. Why such a radical innovation and to what purpose? Why should State parties create a stick with which they themselves might be beaten?

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the changing character of the European Union (“EU”) public order under the impact of security concerns. The EU public order has long been characterized by a tension between a more market-oriented, neo-liberal Union and a more socio-political Union. The former would be driven by the EU's four fundamental freedoms, whereas the latter would be achieved and safeguarded through the language and practice of fundamental rights. As other scholarly contributions to the issue have demonstrated, the relationship between fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights is anything but settled. It continues to be subject to many, sometimes potent, legal and political controversies. However, while the EU public order is still in pursuit of the right balance between economic freedoms and socio-political rights, it also has to reckon with another fundamental value: The value of security.

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.

The relationship between the Court of Justice and the Bundesverfassungsgericht is perhaps one of the most explored relationships in all of EU’s legal history. In attempting to understand and operationalize the uncertainty surrounding the positioning between EU and national constitutional orders, they have in some respects followed the footsteps of a typical life-long love story: in the early years of European integration, both courts appeared to be in denial of any romance, and entered into a conflict over the question of the final arbiter; they subsequently turned to flirting by moving away from an institutionally based conflict towards finding a common substantive ground; which resulted in finally abandoning the competition for domination, but rather embracing mutual respect and a heterarchical relationship. This brief piece follows these developments in fundamental rights review that for now end with the second German decision concerning the right to be forgotten.

Although the temporal effects of judicial decisions have not completely escaped the attention of academic reviewers, the research on this topic is far from thorough. Most research focuses on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), thereby ignoring the temporal effects of judicial decisions of national or constitutional courts. This lack of interest is remarkable given the interaction between the national and European level.

Following the 24 November 2003 decision of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH - Federal Court of Justice) the legal framework for upstream loans granted by companies in the legal form of a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH - Private Limited Company), i.e., loans by the GmbH to its direct and indirect shareholders or to an affiliate of such shareholder, has remained uncertain. The ruling of the BGH led to a broad spectrum of interpretations by legal scholars and practitioners – some even predicted the end of cash pooling arrangements for German corporations – which made it difficult for managers of a GmbH to continue existing cash pooling arrangements without changes to their original scope and conditions.

The study seeks to answer the question of whether there are similarities between the methods used to limit judicial independence in Hungary during the last phase of the communist regime, i.e. before the democratic transition, and today, when many scholars believe that an authoritarian transition is taking place in this country. For this purpose, I argue that despite the undeniable fundamental differences between the political and legal system of these two periods, the mechanisms and ways as the independence of judiciary were and are influenced by the government can plausibly be compared. The analysis seems to support this presumption: both the formal instruments and the informal channels of influence in the hands of the ruling political forces show a number of similarities. Thus, even if there are differences in the degree of their application and result, from centralizing the system of judicial administration to replacing court leaders with politically loyal people there are a number of instruments that enable central government to influence the judiciary, while maintaining the appearance of judicial independence.