During the last decades, social network analysis has been established as a key technique in a number of disciplines in social science. Its main promise is that it provides tools for researchers to take into account the social context of individual entities or actors. Legal scholars, by contrast, have only recently started to make use of these tools. Nowadays, one particularly prominent application is the use of network analysis to analyze the citation networks of different national and international courts. The contribution by Derlén and Lindholm published in this issue of the German Law Journal forms part of this trend. It is the latest in a series of papers studying citations in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Unlike the authors' previous contributions, the paper specifically addresses the use of precedent by the CJEU and assesses the merits of criticism in the literature arguing that the citation practice of the CJEU lacks an acceptable method. The paper provides novel insights into the use of precedent by the CJEU and thus makes an interesting contribution to the emerging scholarship investigating the decision-making of the CJEU by means of quantitative analysis. At the same time, the design of the research raises severe doubts about whether the authors succeed in providing a conclusive response to the critics of the CJEU's citation practice.

How would Denmark react to a wave of mass immigration, numbering several million people, from Germany? The question is, needless to say, purely hypothetical—so much so that one may wonder whether posing it, as a thought experiment, can shed any light on real-life issues and controversies on immigration and integration. I would argue that it can, in some ways precisely because the imaginary case is so far removed from what actually happens. It can thus provide an opportunity for addressing some fundamental issues of immigration and modern nation state without the “distraction” caused by the context in which scholarly and public discussions on immigration—at any rate, in the West—are usually conducted.

This Article deploys cybernetic theory to argue that a novel legal impact imaginary has emerged. In this imaginary, the subjects of legal interventions are performed and enacted as cybernetic organisms, that is, as entities that process information and adapt to changes in their environment. This Article, then, argues that in this imaginary, law finds its effectiveness—not by threatening, cajoling, educating, and moralizing humans as before, but by affecting the composition of cybernetic organisms, giving rise to new kinds of legal subjects that transcend the former conceptual boundary between humans and non-humans, or persons and things. The cybernetic interventions work to change the cyborgs' behavioral responses, thus giving law a new kind modality of power. This Article develops a model for understanding cyborg regulation through case studies and argues that cyborg regulation deploys three distinct strategies. Cyborgs can be controlled through affecting the informational inputs the entities receive, through agencement practices that intervene in the material constitution of the cyborg cognitions, and, finally, by psycho-morphing humans to make them useful components of the cyborg cognitive machineries. The Article ends with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the transition to the cyborg imaginary.

In their contribution in this issue Mattias Derlén and Johan Lindholm use social network analysis to show that the European Court of Justice is a precedent-driven constitutional court that is comparable to the US Supreme Court with regard to the citation of precedents. The article and its use of network analysis as a method provoked a lively debate on the editorial board of the German Law Journal about comparative law theory and methods generally and the place of empirical (including network) analyses in the comparative law discipline. For this reason, the editorial board commissioned this “special section” of contributions dedicated broadly to approaches to comparative law. In his essay in this section, for example, Jens Frankenreiter offers a detailed assessment of Derlén's and Lindholm's analysis. In this piece, we take a broader perspective and look at the utility and the limits of network analysis for legal scholarship generally.

In 2016, the UN's General Assembly called for the negotiation of a Global Compact on Safe, Orderly, and Regulation Migration to be adopted in 2018. The consultations began at the start of 2017 and the negotiations began six months later. Yet, it is uncertain what a Global Compact on Migration should include and what it should look like. What should be the key objectives of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration? In this Article I examine the issue which the UN seeks to address through an analysis of the three problems: Unsafe migration, disorderly migration, and irregular migration.

How many scholarly fields have experienced the disappointing fate of comparative law and continued in the grip of a demonstrably indigent epistemology for decades on end? After the early postmodernity witnessed their protracted servitude to Les Grands systèmes's jejune classifications, facile correspondences, and meagre interpretive return — a predicament which, implausibly, endures in countries as diverse as Brazil, France, and Russia — law's comparatists began taking their epistemic orders from Hamburg and the Hamburgher diaspora. For fifty years or so, they have been gorged on a diet of Rechtsdogmatik, scientism, objectivity, neutrality, truth, and assorted shibboleths. As if these epistemic delusions were not problematic enough, the earlier, obsolete model was eventually revived although tweaked to focus on traditions instead of systems (or families). While critics were occasionally moved to chastise threadbare Hanseatic knowledge-claims — some expressing their concern in conspicuous venues, others harnessing prestigious institutional affiliations — comparative law's orthodoxy, somewhat extraordinarily, has hitherto been able to operate unencumbered by any epistemic challenge whose monographic exposition would have proved decidedly pre-eminent. It is the great merit of Gunter Frankenberg's Comparative Law As Critique, in crucial respects an account at once capital and extensive, that it interrupts, finally, the longstanding deployment of comparative law's mainstream imposture. Frankenberg's refutation is thus well worth restating, and the first part of this review wishes loyally to apply itself to this important representative task not least by affording the author much latitude to express himself in his own voice. Yet, Frankenberg's considerable critical integrity notwithstanding, this essay holds that his epistemic transgression remains too diffident. Specifically, five key concerns at least warranted more subversive epistemic commitments than Frankenberg allows. In the wake of Comparative Law As Critique, the second part of this commentary addresses these contentions with a view to making a case both for comparative law as strong critique and for the paradigmatic epistemic turn that has been persistently deferred within the field.

This Article examines some central questions concerning the status of EU foreigners—non-EU nationals legally residing in the EU. First, it addresses the peculiarities of the status of EU citizens and the special nature of EU immigration law as the basis for the construction of an EU alienage law. Second, it examines whether and to what extent the emergence of a supranational immigration and alienage law—with a focus on integration—interacts with the broader debate on European and national constitutional identity. Third, the Article analyzes the legal difficulties for the application of the equal treatment principle between EU citizens and EU foreigners taking as a point of reference the different roles of restrictions and conditions based on the notion of integration.

This article argues that comparative law needs to explore its critical potential when engaging with the European harmonization process and its effects on the law of the Member States. In the first part, the article evaluates existing comparative law methods and their suitability to identify legal and cultural factors that influence the judicial reception of EU harmonized law on a national level. Using EU non-discrimination law as a case study, it questions to what extent traditional methods are suitable to explain differences in the national judicial reception of EU harmonized law, despite the exclusive competence of the Court of Justice of the European Union to interpret EU law. In doing so, it considers the potential of critical comparative law for the development of a deeper understanding of the national courts' reception of EU harmonized law as a key part of the broader legal harmonization process. In the second part, the article develops an original multi-layered culturally informed method to compare EU harmonized law. The proposal goes beyond the existing methods of comparative law by including critical aspects and stressing the relevance of embedding a general normative framework in any comparative critique. It challenges comparatists to reach deeply into national cultural spheres and to identify key influences on the application of EU rules and EU-national legal ‘hybrids’. The method creates room for multi-layered narratives of comparison aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the national legal and non-legal cultural background that can hinder or facilitate harmonization processes. This enriched comparative critique can offer new insights into the process of legal harmonization in the EU, particularly by focusing on the point of application rather than the previous phases of creation of EU law and its reception by Member States.