On Thursday 19th of July 2012, just prior to the parliamentary summer holidays, the Deutscher Bundestag (German Parliament) passed a resolution based on a rather irritating motivation. The parliament intended to guarantee that “Jewish and Muslim religious life will be further possible in Germany.” The resolution itself consisted in only one sentence: The German Government is requested to provide until fall 2012 – in due consideration of the constitutionally protected legal positions of the well-being of the child, the right to bodily integrity, the right to religious freedom and the parental rights in education – draft legislation in order to safeguard that professionally performed male circumcision, without unnecessary pain, is generally lawful under German law. What had happened to provoke such extraordinary political action in defense of religious freedom? The resolution responds directly to a decision of the Landgericht (Court of Appeal) Cologne from 7 May 2012 which declared that male circumcision in children amounts to criminal battery, even if performed lege artis and with the consent of the parents unless there is a medical indication for the procedure. In doing so, the court followed a restrictive position within the German criminal law literature that has been advocating the criminalization of male

Driving licences, understood as an official authorisation issued by a State permitting a person to drive power-driven vehicles, belongs to those kinds of legal documents that can potentially significantly facilitate and enhance the free movement of persons (EU citizens) between Member States. Provided that a driving licence is duly recognized by Member States other than the State issuing the licence, the holder of the licence can move to those other Member States using his/her individual means of transport, and is entitled to use power-driven vehicles there while pursuing a large number of occupations as an employed or self-employed person. Thus, a driving licence duly recognized by the host Member State enables its holder to move, work, or conduct an economic activity there more effectively and gives the holder some additional options in that regard. Moreover, the driving licence recognized by the host Member State may be used by its holder while there to prove his/her identity and nationality as a Union citizen, and, consequently, it may serve as an equivalent of a passport or identity card. This is important insofar as the requirement to hold those latter documents (or their equivalents) is a formal prerequisite under the relevant EU legislation for Union citizens exercising their rights to enter and to reside in other Member States. The practical importance of driving licences and of the legislation concerning those issues in the EU, especially in the context of free movement of persons, is additionally reinforced by the fact that a valid driving licence is held by an estimated 60% of the Union's population, which means 300 million citizens. The EU and national legislation on driving licences has an undisputed direct impact on their lives.

In 2002, the United Nations (UN) International Law Commission (ILC) decided to include the subject of the responsibility of international organizations (IOs) in its program of work. By 2011, the Commission adopted sixty-six draft articles with commentaries, known as the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (DARIO). The adoption of the DARIO represents an enterprise of revolutionary implications for public international law and the future development of both international law and global relations and governance. It may leverage the international personality of the IO to a status previously unknown, particularly when compared to the supreme international actor, the State.

Almost weekly, it seems, my inbox fills with dozens of academic articles on the topic of “socially responsible investing” or “SRI”. Non-profit organizations across Europe and North America promote SRI as the new investment industry standard. Business schools now offer certificate programs in “sustainable investment”. In 2006, the UN launched the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) to provide a framework for investors interested in practicing responsible investing. The PRI now boast over 1,000 signatories, including asset owners and investment managers.

The aim of this contribution is to illustrate the evolution of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) as a form of European hybrid governance. The hybridity of SEPA is found in the interaction between traditional hard law, soft law and privately produced rules. The public and private systems of rules – public in the form of European directives and regulations and private in the form of multilateral agreements among payment service providers (SEPA Rulebooks) – coexist and mutually shape the structure of the European payments system. These two systems of rules have formally been produced within independent rulemaking processes and by discrete rule-makers – public and private respectively. However, public actors have exercised a considerable amount of influence over the private rules. They have done so through informal yet systematized interactions with private actors and through a series of soft laws. And vice versa, private rule-makers and privately-produced rules substantially have affected the content of public rules.

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.

Publications on the history of international law written during the Cold War can almost be counted on one hand. A pragmatically-oriented generation studied practical areas like UN Charter law, international trade law, or international environmental law, while the theory and history of international law played only a secondary role. An intellectual history of international law, asking which ideas and concepts inspired and formed international law writing, hardly received any attention.

The metaphor of the balance has long dominated national security law and policy. As Richard Posner has explained, one side of the balance “contains individual rights, the other community safety, with the balance needing and receiving readjustment from time to time as the weights of the respective interests change. The safer we feel, the more weight we place on the interest in personal liberty; the more endangered we feel, the more weight we place on the interest in safety, while recognizing the interdependence of the two interests.” While policymakers have debated the relative weight states should give to civil liberty concerns and public security concerns in various contexts, few question the general balance metaphor that structures these debates. By all accounts, interest balancing has provided the primary model for making national security law and policy worldwide since September 11, 2001.

Viewed at a certain angle, the rogue state seems to be in almost necessary relation with the idea of rupture. As Derrida put it in his 2002 lectures on Rogues, the rogue state, état voyou in franglaise,' “is someone who rattles, who shakes things up, who agitates.” Past and present rogue states like Iran, Iraq, Libya or North Korea, are associated with the acquisition of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), state sponsorship of terrorism and the violation of human rights. These entities pose both external threats to other states and internal threats to their own people. Today, the phrase ‘rogue state’ may seem to be past its sell-by-date. While the term was not coined by the G.W. Bush administration, during the eight years it was in power in the United States (US), the phrase became strongly associated with the Bush Doctrine, appearing in key security documents as well as speeches. Under the banner of ‘change’ President Obama, a Nobel Peace Laureate, has distanced himself from the policies of his predecessor. The phrase ‘rogue state’ has been expunged from the current National Security Strategy, for instance.

In the last decade, Canada has become the most important home jurisdiction for mining companies operating globally. Certain Canadian NGOs, faith groups and labor unions argue that these activities systematically give rise to conflicts between companies and local communities in circumstances where companies frequently enjoy effective impunity for the human rights violations they may commit. This assessment has prompted these groups and other likeminded actors to advocate for a series of law reform proposals.

The reference for preliminary ruling concerns the validity of Article 5(2) of Council Directive 2004/113/EC of 13 December 2004, implementing the principle of equal treatment between men and women in the access to and supply of goods and services (hereinafter “Directive 2004/113”). The legal issue is the hotly debated question of whether and to what extent the sex of an insured person can be taken into account as a risk factor in the formulation of private contracts in insurance and related financial services.

As a system of managing environmental and social risk in the sector of large-scale international project finance, the Equator Principles (EPs) have generated increased interest and critical engagement in the private, public, and academic spheres. Particular research in the field of transnational governance is especially concerned with assessing the degree in which private and public actors are revolutionizing the methods and procedures of governance in the wake of the decline of the welfare state, and rise of the post-regulatory state. Social scientists and legal theorists alike have begun analyzing the effects of a shift in the “emphasis of control, to a greater or lesser degree, from traditional bureaucratic mechanisms towards instruments of regulation.” Within this context, the EPs present an opportunity to analyze and assess the structure, procedures and effectiveness of a self-regulatory governance system, voluntarily established by private actors in the international project finance sector, to mitigate social and environmental risks.

On 29 September 2008, the United Kingdom High Court of Justice referred to the European Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) for a preliminary ruling in Karen Murphy v. Media Protection Services Limited. This referral concerned the use of foreign decoder cards in the United Kingdom in order to gain access to encrypted satellite transmissions of live English Premier League football matches. Karen Murphy, a pub owner in Southsea, had allegedly been using the much cheaper Greek satellite decoder card to receive and screen live Premier League matches in public.

The growth of transnational private regulation has involved a great many types of changes, including changes in the types of actors that make rules, in the degree of formality of rules, and in the spatial boundaries of rules. One type of change that merits more focused attention is in the media of rules. Historically a major shift was from rules that were communicated orally, to rules that were inscribed in physical objects. Changes in these objects, from stone or clay to paper and print media were also consequential, enabling rules to be created, preserved and disseminated in new ways. This shift was closely associated with the growth of public authority and its accompanying artefacts such as written constitutions, official documents, and paper money. Today further technological changes in information and communications media are widely recognized as associated with structural transformations of all types of institutions. These technologies facilitate the use of networks and transnational supply chains by business. They stimulate the growth of global social movements and undermine state censorship. They lead to experiments with e-Government and threaten the business models of newspapers and the music industry. But what exactly is the significance of these technological changes for the creation, preservation and dissemination of rules, and how do these changes in the media of rules interact with the growth of transnational private regulation?