The European Court of Human Rights has issued a judgment which adds to the developing law of Article 6, Section 1 (right to a fair hearing) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or “the Convention”) and which sheds light on Article 10 (freedom of expression) and its interaction with the law of defamation. Practically, the decision in Steel and Morris v. the United Kingdom (hereinafter referred to as Steel) is likely to prompt a review of the availability of legal aid for defendants in civil cases in the United Kingdom (“UK”), and may be a small step towards balancing the arms in ad terrorem suits brought by large corporations against private citizens in order to silence public debate.

For decades, German labor law has been among the most advanced in the world, although no labor code was ever enacted like, for e.g., in France with its ‘Code du travail’ adopted on 15th November 1973. In Germany, after World War II, German labor legislation developed a great variety of specific Acts covering individual and collective labor law. Basics, like protection against dismissal or collective bargaining, as well as employee participation in works councils, reached a high level. Although German law belongs to the Continental legal systems and thus is mainly based on legislation, some of the most important aspects of collective labor law, especially trade union law and the right to strike are not regulated by statutory law. Bundesarbeitsgericht (the Federal Labor Court) and Bundesverfassungsgericht (the Federal Constitutional Court) filled in the blanks step by step in a variety of decisions. Accordingly, these crucial fields of labor relations are based on mere case law. It turned out to be politically impossible to get trade union law and the law on strike and lock-outs enacted. Despite statements to the contrary, the parties involved seem to be content with this rather flexible handling. On the whole, German labor law became more and more protective over the years, including aspects like equality and prohibition of discrimination in employment, sick-leave payment, and the possibility to claim a part-time job under the 2000 Act on Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz – TzBfG (Part Time and Temporary Work).

A vital measure of the influence of a thinker on a discipline is the extent to which they transform its customs, protocols and practices in a way that makes it difficult to conceive how things were done before they appeared on the scene. Such transformations are usually simply incorporated into the discipline and presupposed by those who come after. This is why we often have a thankless relation to the most influential thinkers – because their innovations are now the way in which we are accustomed to see and do things. Definitionally then, great thinkers are often those who change the way we do things in a peculiarly thankless way. Jacques Derrida was a great thinker. He exerted a massive influence over a whole generation of people working in philosophy. His death is an unfathomable loss. In what follows I would like to thank him for what he enabled people like me to presuppose thanklessly in our practice.

So-called “acting in concert” is one of the most controversial problems in German takeover law. The latest discussion of the topic has been fuelled by the claim that investors, mainly investment funds, acted in concert through the application of strong pressure in order to cause the personnel change in the management structure of Deutsche Börse AG.” A further contribution has been made by the much noted ruling of the Regional Appellate Court Munich (OLG München) of 27 April 2005 concerning acting in concert in the cause of the election of the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat). The following article concentrates on a critical analysis of this ruling of OLG München.

In this journal, Buchheim and Beiersdorf discussed recent changes in the regulation of the management report (Lagebericht) in Germany. The German Commercial Code (HGB – Handelsgesetzbuch) requires a management report by individual entities classified as companies with limited liability in § 289 and by groups in § 315. The reporting requirements of the latter are specified by the German Accounting Standard GAS 15 on Management Reporting. The authors award the German regulation to potentially lead the way internationally.

Until recently, cheap fiction and corporate finance most famously met in the creative accounting of companies like WorldCom and Enron. Now, however, both the spoof James Bond, Austin Powers, and the securities regulators of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France face common, twin malevolence: Doctor Evil and Mini Me. These reportedly were the names of a trading strategy devised at the London based European government bond desk of Citigroup Inc. to correct – as reported in the The Wall Street Journal Europe – what a senior bank executive had referred to as their not “making enough money for the firm.” According to the Journal, “Citigroup wanted to use the futures market to push up prices for bonds traded on the cash market, which tend to follow futures prices. Then they would dump a large amount of bonds in the cash market, reaping profits from their holdings and forcing down prices, to the detriment of other market participants.” At 10:00 am on August 2, 2004, six Citigroup traders launched “Mini Mi” by building up positions in the Eurex futures market, then at 11:29 am they unleashed the “Dr. Evil” trading program, which placed sell orders for various European government bonds, with a total aggregate value of € 83 billion, of which only € 12.4 found buyers; once “the price of the bonds had fallen because of the flood of sell orders, Citigroup bought back € 3.8 billion in bonds … and is estimated to have made around € 15 million in profit.” The spot sales were primarily conducted on the MTS fixed-income trading platform, and constituted 42% of the platform's total value for the day; the traders had cash positions of only about € 8 billion in the securities for which they placed sell orders of up to € 83 billion, which could have left them with a much larger short position than the € 4.4 billion they eventually had.

In a world of societies ever more closely interrelating to each other, lawyers face the challenge of crossing the borders of their national legal system and looking beyond its fundamental source of identity – the constitution. Having this thought in mind, Harald Eberhard, Konrad Lachmayer and Gerhard Thallinger organized the First Vienna Workshop on International Constitutional Law held on 20 and 21 May 2005, bringing together members of the academic community, legal officers in International Organizations and law students. The Workshop offered eight lectures and fruitful discussions on the comparative analysis of constitutional law thus providing a new impetus to a field of law of steadily growing importance to which, so far, too little attention has been given.

The identity of the European Union has, for some years now, been the topic of many debates. The recent enlargement of the Union has stirred this debate and has not appeased it. There are various key topics that inspire the discussion, which included, for example, conceptions of citizenship. The following remarks will offer a sketch of some of the issues that come to the fore in this respect. Of particular interest here are the connections between the process of the constitutionalisation of Europe and the question of the desirability, or even necessity, of a homogenous European identity. I will first name some exemplary concrete problems that are connected with questions of politics of identity. I will then undertake a short illustrative look into the history of ideas to trace back some of the lines of thought that are relevant in the discussion. Finally, I want to suggest a possible normative perspective of how to proceed.

The Federal Republic of Germany is a state that shows a strong support for culture of any kind. While it is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), it can be argued that very few nations regard the promotion of the arts, sciences and education as a public undertaking to the extent that Germany does. The federal structure of the German constitution is reflected in the allocation of governmental tasks between the federal government and the individual federal states, or Länder. Under this structure, the Länder bear the primary responsibility for cultural matters. However, contrary to widely-held belief, the Basic Law also grants the federal government a range of legislative, administrative and financial powers with respect to cultural matters. Although when taken together these do not add up to a comprehensive promotional authority of the federal government in the cultural sector, due to numerous individual empowerments, the federal government is without doubt in a position to take an active role in cultural affairs to a significant extent.

“The existing federal system is obsolete”, said Federal President Horst Köhler, announcing his decision, in a television address of 21 July 2005, to dissolve the German Bundestag (Parliament) and to call new elections. The following day, the German Law Journal hosted its third international workshop on theory and developments in German Federalism at the Max Planck Institute for the Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. The setting was appropriate, since the Institute is located between two former permanent representations of the federal states (Länder). The building itself once housed the Egyptian embassy, and so presented “neutral ground” for a discussion on federalism.

In June 2004, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH – Federal Court of Justice) handed down a verdict in one of the longest trials involving terrorist criminal activities in German history. The so called “La Belle” case provided legal action resulting from the bombing of the discotheque “La Belle” in West Berlin in 1986, which, at the time, was attended mostly by American soldiers. The BGH had to review the ruling of the Berliner Landgericht (LG – District Court), where the trial started in November 1997. After 281 days of trial and 170 witnesses a guilty verdict was handed down by the Berliner LG, which found the defendants guilty of murder and of aiding and abetting murder in the deaths at the “La Belle.” Four defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging between 12 and 14 years. In its final ruling on the case, the BGH, in principal, affirmed the verdict of the lower court by overruling most of the appellate claims of the prosecution, the defendants and the joint plaintiffs.

The following reflections, that will focus exclusively on the European primacy clause in the light of the Statement by the Constitutional Court no. 1/2004 of 13 December, in particular with regard to its scope as regards the Spanish Constitution itself, may take as a starting point the conclusion contained at the last paragraph of FJ 4 of the Statement, which states as follows:

“In the scarcely-conceivable event that in the ultimate functioning of European Union Law this Law were to result irreconcilable with the Spanish Constitution, and without the hypothetical excesses of European Law with regard to the European Constitution itself being remedied by the ordinary channels provided for in the latter, ultimately the preservation of the sovereignty of the Spanish people and of the supremacy of the Constitution as it provides for itself could lead this Court to tackle the problems that would arise in such a case, and which from the current point of view are considered to be non-existent, by way of the relevant constitutional procedures”.

The 60th anniversary of the trial against the major war criminals of World War II before the International Military Tribunal Trial (IMT) in Nuremberg was the subject matter of an international conference held in Nuremberg from Sunday, July 17 to Wednesday, July 20, 2005. The conference was presented by Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, Institute on the Holocaust and the Law, Huntington, USA, in association with the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” – “Remembrance and Future” Fund, supported, amongst others, by the Higher Regional Court of Nuremberg, the Faculty of Law, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg and the German-American Lawyers’ Association.

The pre-conference session was opened by the President of the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court, Dr. Stefan Franke, who welcomed the audience in “the room where world history was made”, the original setting of the IMT in courtroom 600 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. He was followed by Prof. Dr. Mathias Rohe (Dean of Law, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg), who, as a sign of remembrance, read out a list of those members of the University who were deprived of their doctorates during the Third Reich.

Since receiving the invitation to participate in this special issue, I have been wondering about whether I can do justice in this brief space to what I have learnt from reading Derrida. And as someone who long ago began to distrust those versions of the history of ideas organized around the names of important individuals, I've also wondered about how and why I would want to link lessons to the proper name “Jacques Derrida.” Indeed the pleasure, and even the reward, I have received from reading Derrida is hard for me to separate out from the experience of living as part of a community that exists within and across the institutions I inhabit, with colleagues, students and friends. I associate Derrida with a way of life, a way of reading, writing, speaking and listening to each other, that is part of the “simple day-to-dayness” and “the intense moments of work, teaching and thinking” that constitutes this community, that allies us. I hope I can communicate a little of what reading Derrida has meant, and still does mean, to me then within this particular institutional life.