The Federal Republic of Germany celebrated its fortieth birthday in 1989, and the sudden and unexpected accession of the former German Democratic Republic the following year has drawn the world's attention to the newly united nation. This article is the third installment in an effort to explain the basic features of the German constitution.

The gradual digitization of EU migration policies is turning external borders into AI-driven filters that limit access to fundamental rights for people from third countries according to risk indicators. An unshakeable confidence in the reliability of technological devices and their ability to predict the future behaviour of incoming foreigners is leading towards the datafication of EU external frontiers. What happens if the supposedly infallible algorithms are wrong? The article aims to understand the consequences of algorithmic errors on the lives of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the European Union. This contribution investigates the socio-political implications of deploying data-driven solutions at the borders in an attempt to problematize the techno-solutionist approach of EU migratory policies and its fundamental rights impact on affected individuals.

Why is the fight against financial crimes such a central task for the EU? The EU has a strong interest to counter financial crimes and fraud against the EU budget as those crimes—so the EU legislator's claim is—hamper the trust in the market and undermine consumer confidence to engage in internal market transactions. In this Article, we aim to discuss the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor Office as a federal agent and the effects of this agent for establishing a robust EU financial crimes regime. Comparisons with the US system of US Attorneys—federal prosecutors—will be drawn to show that this institution has been quite effective at enhancing the protection of US financial market. The Article will then discuss to what extent the EU can, and should, learn from the American experience. We are particularly interested in the strong security focus in the EU and its consequences when it ventures into the area of financial crimes.

This article uses the case study of Slovakia and its lackluster experience with a judge-dominated judicial council to demonstrate that formal institutions have only limited impact on the ideational level. We show that the transformation of the Slovak post-communist judiciary relied on the presumption that judges‘ interests are automatically complementary to principles of the rule of law. Therefore, the majority of implemented reforms insulated the judiciary from the political branches of power, but allowed strong hierarchical relationships inside the courts to exist. In contrast to international expectations, judicial authorities used judicial empowerment to create or strengthen competing informal practices, which helped them to maximize their power. We argue that the lack of internalization of judicial independence might explain why institutional self-governance reforms failed to trigger changes in the professional role conception of judges in regimes riddled with deeply embedded informal institutions. In order to tackle this problem, we propose that future research on the relationship between institutional safeguards and decisional judicial independence should focus on the process through which actors internalize new institutional incentives.

Formation of a holding SE is one of the four ways of establishing a European Company (societas europaea - ‘SE') as regulated in the Council Regulation No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European Company (cited below: SE-Reg.). It is also an original way of European company law to create a joint stock company. It's true that companies are making use of the holding structure in order to combine their economic potentials and to create international groups of enterprises. But, as it was in the case of the formation of the Aventis S.A., the holding structures usually come into existence by means of an increase of the subscribed capital in an existing company. The new shares are issued to the shareholders of another company who pay for it with the shares of their company. The operation results in formation of a holding structure in which the company that increased its capital, becomes a holding company dominating a company or companies the shares of which were contributed. The formation of a holding SE is guided by the similar idea: an exchange of the shares of national private or public limited liability companies into the shares of a European Company. However, in contrast to the Aventis like-cases, the dominant company, i.e. the SE, does not exist yet but has to be created by the companies according to the provisions of the SE-Regulation. This fact as well as many legal gaps existing in the scanty regulation of holding formation and the necessity to apply both the provisions of European and national law concomitantly may lead to many legal problems some of which will be presented below.

That the Law is never frozen in time and space is quite a trivial insight – but one, however, that is nonetheless particularly true for the area of international human rights law and the jurisdiction to see human rights norms respected and enforced. No less is it true for international criminal law and European law. It is, of course, true at the intersection of these three fields of the law as well, exactly the place I intend to explore in this paper. And, as we shall see, poetry, that rarely unveiled subtext of the law, is never steady in its foundations.

In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council agreed upon a new strategic goal for the European Union: to become the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” One decade and the sobering experience of a global economic crisis later, the European Commission's new 2020 Strategy sets out a vision of Europe's social market economy for the 21st century that “shows how the EU can emerge stronger from the economic crisis and how it can be turned into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy delivering high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion.” If somewhat more modest in its targets, Europe 2020 reiterates the guiding ambition to enhance the EU's economic performance in the internal and global market that already dominated the Lisbon strategy. The lesson learned from Europe's “lost decade” is that the EU needs to replace the “slow and largely uncoordinated pace of reforms” with a “sustainable recovery” in order to regain its competitiveness, boost its productivity, and put it on “an upward path of prosperity.” This is, then, the EU's first “Lisbon” agenda that heavily relies on the internal market and that depicts social inclusion and political stability as conditioned upon further European economic integration. The recipe to defy what has grown from a “merely” economic crisis into a social and political crisis of the Union and its Member States is a combination of “smart,” “sustainable,” and “inclusive” growth.

In these notes, I reflect on the possibilities of confronting the darkest chapters of East-Central European history, namely, genocide. This problem is closely related to the moral refoundation of society, law and politics. My concerns are primarily related to the role of law in the process, both descriptively, by trying to explain very contradictory developments in Hungary, and normatively, by arguing for a shame dictated legal policy.

In a thought-provoking article, Alec Stone Sweet put forward a problem he called the juridical Coup d'État. His work was the opening of a debate to which Neil Walker, Wojciech Sadurski and Gianluigi Palombella contributed. In a subsequent essay, Stone Sweet responded to their comments. In this article, I would like to sketch this debate and explore its significance for legal theory. It is my hypothesis that the problem of the juridical coup is closely connected with the relationship between constituent (constituting) and constituted (constitutional) power. Moreover, the juridical coup shows in an exemplary way how this relationship should be understood. Before addressing the problem in these terms (Section C), analyzing an additional example of a juridical coup in EU law (Section D) and developing my own position vis-à-vis the different contributors (Section E), in the following section, I will give an overview of the argument of Stone Sweet. Taking into account the wealth of issues raised by him, I will concentrate on those aspects of his essay that are of most interest from a legal-philosophical point of view. Thus, the first question to be answered is: What are we to understand under a Juridical Coup d'État and what is its theoretical importance?

In response to the violence of the international system, “realist” approaches are flourishing. In the aftermath of “9/11”, gulf war No. 3, the challenge to the achievements of international law and the unchallengeable dominance of the US military-industrial complex, this is particularly noticeable. Theories which affirm an anarchical world without any international regulation, in which only the application of military power guarantees freedom and security are gaining credibility. This everyday understanding is also employed in Robert Kagan's essay. While “the Americans” exercise power in an anarchical international system, “the Europeans” aim for a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity. The fuss about Kagan's essay can hardly be explained by a rich analysis of the current international situation, for it does not supply this. It is even more surprising that the superficial pattern of interpretation considers that the essay expresses a “fundamental truth of the international system,” which is only articulated once in ten years. But we want to argue that it is not about “truth,” but about the production and propagation of a hegemonic discourse. Accordingly Kagan must be perceived as what he is: the co-founder of the reactionary think tank “Project for a New American Century”; an intellectual belonging to the neo-conservative leadership structure, a group that pressed the ideological case for the war against Iraq.

On January 20, 2007, the Transparenzrichtlinie-Umsetzungsgesetz (Transparency Directive Implementation Act or TUG) came into effect implementing the European Transparency Directive. It entails some significant changes to the disclosure requirements of German listed corporations, such as a newly introduced Bilanzeid (confirmation of the balance sheet). In addition, material alterations to the share ownership notification rules in the Wertpapierhandelsgesetz (German Securities Trading Act or WpHG) have been made. The latter changes should be carefully observed by investors and are analyzed in this article.

Most European and American attorneys and judges think the U.S.A. has its legal roots in English common law, and that is probably true for the many areas of U.S. law that are still controlled by the traditional common-law process of simultaneously making and applying law. Yet, with respect to constitutional law – America's greatest legal contribution to modern respect for the rule of law, the roots of the U.S. legal system are firmly planted in Europe, not England. The U.S. Constitution was inspired by French revolutionary ideas of rationalism in law; it was intended as an integrated document just like codes; and it has been interpreted by American judges to be not just a political document but binding law – law that is binding on all three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary. In fact that was the holding in Marbury v. Madison, the case decided exactly two hundred years ago.

In light of the uncertainty surrounding recent unilateral declarations of independence, this Article purports to re-visit the question of their legal nature under international law. The Article shows that the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) judgment in the Kosovo advisory opinion (hereafter referred to as the Kosovo Opinion) is of little assistance in establishing whether and to what extent such declarations fall within the ambit of international law. The Article proceeds to examine claims that unilateral declarations of independence are regulated—entirely or partly—by international law and argues that these claims are ill-founded on multiple grounds. The Article asserts that international law is legally neutral towards the claims—a proposition in accord with both the factual nature of the process of state formation in international law and with the relevant practice.

This Article develops a methodological basis for elaborating an idea of global constitutionalism. It applies this broader understanding of the idea of global constitutionalism to an examination of the specific role played by human rights within the evolving framework of global legal governance. The methodological basis from which the idea of global constitutionalism is developed derives from work in historical sociology that emphasizes the role played by underlying symbolic forms in the structure of social reality. The approach adopted here lays particular emphasis, following Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, on the role of political theology as the principal mode in which symbolic form is constituted. From this perspective, the notion of the global human rights model is scrutinized as central to the symbolic form of global constitutionalism. Developed in critical engagement with the work of Samuel Moyn, human rights can be seen as central to global constitutionalism viewed as the latest political constellation of a distinctively secular understanding of the symbolic form and limits of political authority.

The example of the German Law Journal has been very important for the creation of a new legal journal, the Italian Journal of Public Law. First, that example was very persuasive due to the importance of the traditional ties between the German and Italian legal cultures. Second, following that example, unlike most e-journals in the legal field in Italy, the Italian Journal of Public Law devotes considerable attention to theoretical issues. Its goal is essentially to serve as a bridge between legal cultures and this explains the choice of English as the working language. This does not imply, however, a demise of the national tradition, in particular as far as the distinctiveness of public law is concerned. Openness towards other legal cultures implies, rather, an even stronger awareness of the existence of a variety of approaches or methods, in contrast with the faith in “the” legal method, conceived in a unitary way, which characterized part of the last century.