Whether patents should be granted on human genes or gene sequences is highly controversial, both ethically and politically; not only in Germany but throughout Europe and in most parts of the world. Proof of this has been the attention created by US biotechnology company Myriad Genetics, which, in 2001, obtained European patents for human gene sequences indicating an increased risk of certain types of cancer. In Germany the Bundestag has recently addressed the issue: the core of a newly introduced provision of the German Patent Statute (PatG) is Paragraph 1a Sec. 4 PatG, which limits the scope of patent protection available for human gene sequences or parts thereof. If the subject of an invention is a human gene sequence, Paragraph 1a Sec. 4 PatG requires disclosure of not only the sequence but also at least one application. Without such disclosure a human gene sequence is not patentable under German Patent Law. This is remarkable, because under the Directive of the European Parliament and the Council on the Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions, the so-called Biotechnology Directive of 1998, a piece of European Union legislation, the situation is different.

European Union (EU) regulation of the free circulation of goods may be considered an eminent jurisprudential achievement; in fact, it has emerged from and been strengthened by the judgments of the European Court of Justice (hereinafter “the Court”).

In particular, the Court's engagement with the prohibition on quantitative import restrictions and other measures having an equivalent effect established by Article 28 European Convention (EC), has paved the road towards integration. This was especially true of the Court's “milestone” decisions in Dassonville and Cassis de Dijon.

The judicial parameter established by those judgments was built upon the interpretation of “quantitative restrictions” as encompassing any “measures hindering trade.” Although this has proven to be, for a limited period of time, an efficient instrument in pursuing Treaty goals, like the creation of a single European market, it has also produced a few side effects, including: (a) an excessive broadening of the field of Article 28 EC's application; and, consequently, (b) an increase in the number of claims the Court has had to examine. This has placed the Court in the position of having to weigh, more and more frequently, the content of national policies in order to determine whether the restrictions they impose can be justified.

The issue of how democratic and constitutional nation states shall square international cooperation with their commitments to constitutionalism, democratic accountability and fundamental rights is a persistent problem that becomes ever more pressing with increasing international integration. The German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) is well-known for having developed a detailed case law on the extent and forms of delegation of powers from the German state to inter-and supranational organizations.

The news that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting “Berliner Strassenszene“ (Berlin Street Scene) will be up for sale in New York on November 8, 2006 has stirred up the international art scene for the past two months. The sale was announced shortly after the Berlin state senate had returned the painting to the heirs of its original owners, Jewish art collectors Alfred and Tekla Hess. For the past 26 years the piece had been hanging in the Brücke Museum in Berlin and formed a cornerstone of the museum's expressionist collection. Bought, from public funds, in 1980, for a little over $ 1 Million US, the painting is expected to sell this fall for $ 18 Million to $ 25 Million US.

The new Insolvency Statute (Insolvenzordnung – InsO), which came into force on 1 January 1999, sets a discharge of residual debts (Restschuldbefreiung), sections 286 – 303 InsO. When the debtor is a natural person, he or she can request the discharge on the basis of two different insolvency proceedings: either in accordance with the regular insolvency proceedings or in accordance with the consumer insolvency proceedings. The discharge of residual debts has both a social and an economic function. On the one hand, it serves as personal protection for the debtor, especially his rights of privacy and dignity (allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht); it will give debtors a new perspective. On the other hand, the provisions intend to (re)integrate debtors into economic life, thereby avoiding illegal employment.

This essay describes an emergent scheme for modernizing the study of law in German universities, creating a structure that is better equipped to address twentyfirst century socio-legal issues and bring legal scholarship to bear on relevant research problems in the social sciences—and vice versa. It is a by-product of efforts by University of Bremen professors and administrators to foster their university's coming of age as a mature, internationally recognized research university and to compete for new funds that the German government is making available to select universities. As such, it provides a rare example of the integration of legal studies into a large interdisciplinary research program, and of law professors rising to the challenges of contemporary funding demands, joining forces with political scientists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers.

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.

The momentum behind the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Treaty was not that Brussels realised that the peoples of Europe were crying out for the drafting of a beautiful text, which they could take to their hearts as their very own constitution. That much, at least, has always been fairly clear. Of course, this should not present an impenetrable barrier to constitutional endeavour, because the constitutional possibility is the possibility that is generated by the effort of founding community in the honouring of community, honouring community in the recognition of community, recognising community in the identification of community, and identifying community in the founding of community. Every constitutional text is “guilty” of grasping and writing down its declarative commitment in this way. At two levels, then, the peculiarity of the European situation comes to light. First, this very fact that the people did not consider themselves part of a community that could be founded, honoured, recognised and identified through a constitutional register managed to become the crucial justifying motive for the production of a constitutional text. Secondly, and infinitely more significantly, this unspoken but widely-held belief in the constitutional impossibility becomes the register in which we seek to understand all the various positions and interests that emerge in the constitutional debate, and through which we seek to mandate those positions in the constitutional text.

After an Israeli soldier was abducted in the south of the country in late June, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) began Operation “Summer Rain” in Gaza in order to secure the safe return of the soldier. On 12 July 2006, Hezbollah forces captured two Israeli soldiers in Northern Israel and killed three more, triggering Operation “Just Reward”, which ended with the fragile cease-fire agreed upon under the terms outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701. The conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah had the potential of plunging the whole region in a wider war; as a matter of fact, it seems that Iran and Syria were fighting a proxy war against Israel. Hezbollah alone does not have the technological capabilities of hitting Haifa or Nazareth with their own Katjusha-type missiles, which essentially are not much more than slightly modified World War II weapons, yet Hezbollah struck deep inside Israel. On the last day of the war alone, with the cease-fire already in sight, 246 rockets were fired into Israel. Moreover, it appears that Israel was not hit only by Katjushot but also by other missiles with a longer range. Given their arsenal and longstanding support for Hezbollah, the assumption that Iran and Syria have actually delivered missiles or missile technology to Hezbollah is anything but farfetched. News reports during the conflict indicated that Hezbollah used Syrian 220mm-missiles against Israel and that weapons have been delivered to the Hezbollah from Iran, often via Syria. Hezbollah's arsenal includes Iranian-made Zilzal-2 missiles with a range of 210 km, Russian-designed AT-5 anti-tank weapons which were produced in Iran, as well as Russian-made Kornet-E laser-guided weapons and Metis-M anti-armor weapons, both supplied by Syria. Most notorious was the use of Iranian Fajr-3 missiles against Israeli cities. Thousands of these missiles had already been provided to Hezbollah before the fighting began. The rockets that hit the town of Afula, south of Haifa, on 28 July 2006, and which was referred to by Hezbollah as Khaibar-1, likely were the first Iranian-made Fajr-5 missiles ever used by Hezbollah. Despite the destruction of the infrastructure in Lebanon during Operation “Just Reward”, Hezbollah continued to receive weapons. But Syrian and Iranian influence goes back a long time. Today's Hezbollah is the result of an Iranian-nurtured program that lasted for two decades and transformed a local guerilla group into a full-fledged army. Today, Hezbollah's military wing is no longer a group of partisans but an army comprising between 6,000 and 8,000 regular members, not counting reserves, divided into battalions of 250 men, as well as special forces. Not only was it the late Ayatollah Khomeni who provided the initiative for the foundation of Hezbollah, Iran continues to trains Hezbollah fighters and supports Hezbollah's army with weapons, such as the C-802 land-to-sea-missile that was used against the Israeli Naval Ship “Hanit” during the recent conflict.

The amended German Act against restraints of Competition (Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen – GWB) has been in force since 1 July 2005. After a long and controversial debate, including a mediation procedure between the Bundestag (Lower House of the German Federal Parliament) and the Bundesrat (Upper House of the German Federal Parliament), and two and a half years after the adoption of Regulation No. 1/2003 in December 2002 the 7th Amendment to the Law against restraints of Competition was finally adopted in June 2005. Interestingly, the delay in passing the 7th Amendment – more than one year after Regulation No.1 came in force – was not so much caused by the fundamental changes that had become necessary in the light of Regulation No. 1. Rather, it was caused by those changes which did not become part of it: the proposed reform of merger control in the newspaper industry. Nonetheless, the latest amendment of the German competition law brought a greater number of fundamental changes than the six previous amendments adopted between 1958 and 1998. More specifically, the 7th Amendment abolished numerous specialties of the German antitrust law, which had been cultivated during previous decades. At the same time, it pointed to the increasing “Europeanization” (or, in other words, the decreasing relevance) of the national competition law that primarily covers the rules regarding anti-competitive agreements, decisions and concerted practices and is likely to extend to other areas in the future, such as unilateral conduct and merger control.

On 22 November 2005, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) delivered a judgement in a preliminary ruling procedure from the Arbeitsgericht München (Labour Court Munich), answering questions concerning the interpretation of Clauses 2, 5 and 8 of the Framework Agreement on fixed-term contracts, put into effect by Council Directive 1999/70/EC of 28 June 1999, and as regards the construction of Article 6 of Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation. Essentially, the Arbeitsgericht wanted to know whether a statutory provision exempting employees of 52 years of age and older from limitations to the conclusion of fixed-term contracts was compatible with Community law.

In German constitutional law doctrine, the principal problem which state measures are to be qualified as relevant restrictions to activate the protection by basic rights has not yet been conclusively solved. According to the classic definition, a relevant restriction is given if the infringement of a basic right is final (not a merely unintentional consequence of an activity that aims at fulfilling other purposes) and direct (not only an intended but indirect consequence of the state activity), a legal act with legal (not merely de facto) effects and issued or executed by order and force. Restrictions that do not fall under this definition are problematic. This in particular goes for triangle constellations where the reaction of the addressee of a State measure causes a detriment to a third person's basic rights so that it must be asked whether that restriction can be attributed to the State so that it must justify them, possibly like other direct state measures. A typical example is the case of state warnings against dangerous products; when followed these warnings cause consumers to avoid these products and result in negative effects on the producer's commercial activities, activities that are protected by the freedom of profession or the property right. Connected with the problem of the right classification of such state measures is the question of in what cases restrictions that are found relevant under aspects of basic rights doctrine must correspond with the provision of legality and with other substantive principles in order to be justified. In the case of classical infringements, there is no doubt that a legal authorization is needed and that the principle of proportionality must be observed.

In its judgment of 18 July 2005, the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) declared the European Arrest Warrant Act (Europäisches Haftbefehlsgesetz – hereafter called the EAWA) of 21 July 2004 unconstitutional and void.

However, the result of total nullity of the EAWA, as well as certain points of the Court's reasoning were not undisputed within the senate, which becomes obvious with the dissenting opinions of the judges Broß, Lübbe-Wolff and Gerhardt. Beyond these judges, the ruling faced scholars’ criticism as well.

Despite never-ending discussion and innumerable reforms, the German system of legal education still has as its objective the so-called Einheitsjurist. This being a German specialty, it is almost impossible to find an English expression for it. One might try the translation “uniform jurist.” To qualify as an Einheitsjurist, every law student must go through the same legal education no matter which of the classical juridical professions he or she wants to pursue. To be admitted to the Bar, the same formal qualification is required as for the admission to the Bench. In both cases you have to pass the “second state exam.”

… fulfilment of my first ambition – to describe international law in a way that would resonate with practitioner experience – necessitated that I resist the pull of either excessive “formalism” or excessive policy-oriented “realism”. In the course of writing, however, I began to realise that this way of stating the problem also contained the seeds of its resolution … I needed to think about my own experience as far from idiosyncratic and to examine the contrast between “formalism” and “realism” as an incident of the standard experience of any international lawyer in the normal contexts of academy or practice.

With his book “The Gentle Civilizer of Nations”, the Finnish expert on international law Martti Koskenniemi, became the most widely read author in his field overnight. In the “Gentle Civilizer”, Koskenniemi presented a new history of international law between 1870 and 1960. The tremendous success of this book rested less on an amazing number of revealing observations, but rather on its new take on the history of this discipline. In Koskenniemi's interpretation, the scientific project of international law did not start off as an endeavour that was centred on the sovereignty of nation-states. Instead, the international lawyers of that era saw their subject in the light of the idealist political project of internationalism. When they were forced to give up their high hopes in the course of the 20th century — this is where the twist of the book lies — they not only abandoned their dreams, but also their craft as lawyers. They became mere engineers of international relations, pragmatists, and apologists of governmental power. In order to retrieve the craft of international law, Koskenniemi concludes, the discipline needs to handle legal forms in a politically reflective manner. Koskenniemi has labelled this squaring of the circle, in a much-cited expression, as the “Culture of Formalism.”

In German post-war history, hardly any other trial concerning economic criminal cases attracted as much interest as the so-called Mannesmann trial. This is for two main reasons. First, the facts that form the basis of the decision, that is, the hostile takeover of the German Mannesmann AG by the British Vodafone, attracted much attention and sparked public discussion about eliminating the very possibility of hostile takeovers in general in Germany. Second, interest in the case was due to the magnitude of the bonuses granted and the significance this had for the public at large. As a consequence of this trial and the settled payments, the debate around the appropriateness of executive compensations, existing prior to the case, grew more acute. After all, the current draft law to disclose executive pay resulted from these debates about the size of the compensations.

Information about the insolvency of big enterprises such as Enron and Worldcom in the United States; Bremer Vulkan, Philip Holzmann, Babcock Borsig, CargoLifter, Walter Bau and “Ihr Platz GmbH & Co KG” in Germany; and discussion about the insolvency of States (e.g. Argentina) has awakened public interest in insolvency law and proceedings. Both the high number of insolvent enterprises and the increasing rate of consumer insolvency are shocking.

The German Insolvency Act of 1999 created a uniform insolvency statute for all of Germany. In most cases, upon the instituting of insolvency proceedings, only small or no-insolvency estates were available. As a result, creditors only received average distributions of between three and five percent. Approximately three quarters of all insolvency procedures could not be instituted because of an insufficient insolvency estate. A large number of the insolvency proceedings carried out by the courts had to be terminated prematurely due to lack of assets. This deficiency in the law, referred to as the “bankruptcy of bankruptcy,” is to be remedied by the new Insolvency Act, as a failure in instituting insolvency proceedings is damaging confidence in the German economy.

Shocking news for police and intelligence agencies in Germany: the search for inland sleepers following the terrorist attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon was unconstitutional. Preventive data screening is incompatible with the fundamental right of informational self-determination according to Article 2 (I) in connection with Article 1 (I) of the Grundgesetz (GG - Basic Law). Since the ruling of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BverfG - Federal Constitutional Court) of 4 April, 2006 (1 BvR 518/02), such numerous acquisition of data is not permitted unless a concrete threat to important objects of legal protection is existent.