Over the past 60 years the German Basic Law has become one of the most influential constitutional systems in the world. According to some commentators, the German model rivals even U.S. constitutionalism as the preeminent legal system in the world. This state of affairs is apparent in the dozens of states across Europe and Latin America that have adopted the German model.

For some of those who support the Lisbon Treaty, it is difficult to accept that a 53% majority of the 53% voting electorate of a country of a population of 4.4 million should, by voting to reject ratification of the Treaty, single-handedly bring to a halt a process which involves 27 countries with a combined population of almost 500 million. Their point is that there are undemocratic consequences for the whole of Europe if the Lisbon Treaty does not enter into force as a result of the referendum defeat in Ireland, and therefore they argue that there are democratic reasons for objecting to the agreed legal consequences of the result of the Irish referendum. This only holds if we manage to forget, for a moment, that the decision to make the implementation of the Treaty conditional on the unanimous support of all Member States was never something that was at the whim of the Irish electorate, and if we manage to endorse, for a moment, the argument that respecting the effect that an individual Member State's national constitutional and democratic procedures have on the other Member States is only important if lots of people live there. Furthermore, the credibility of the argument depends, in significant part, on the credibility of its three (dubious) assumptions: that Europe has one unified ‘demos’; that democracy means majoritarianism by reference to that single demos; and that, even though the peoples of the other 26 Member States were not consulted prior to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in their countries, they were accurately represented by their governments who approved ratification. It is noteworthy, however, that there should be an objection to the agreed legal consequences of the Lisbon Treaty rejection which claims for itself the democratic high-ground.

On 28 June 2008, the German Bundestag (Federal Parliament) passed a bill on the reform of German corporate law. Known as the Gesetz zur Modernisierung des GmbH-Rechts und zur Bekämpfung von Missbräuchen (MoMiG – Law for the Modernization of the GmbH and to Stop its Misuse) the bill is a milestone, the single most important reform of the most commonly used German corporate form. The reform will bring about major changes. Among other things the reform will make it possible to establish a GmbH with a share capital of nothing more than € 1 EURO (previously, € 25,000 had been required) and to establish a GmbH that has no active business in Germany but solely operates abroad. Although the bill still has to be approved by the Bundesrat (Federal Council of the States), which will probably vote on this matter on 19 September, experts have little doubt that the reform easily will pass this last hurdle and enter into force as soon as 1 November.

Almost half of all Holocaust victims remain nameless statistics. Just over three million names of Jewish Holocaust victims are known today, representing little more than half of the victims. It is estimated that when all names are retrieved from published and unpublished documents the total number may rise to four million, which leaves two million unknown names. Since memory is closely connected to the identity symbolized by a name, those who cannot be named cannot be remembered. To retrieve a name is to rescue a person from oblivion.

The development of media law in recent years is – following a brief stage of calm in the course of establishing the ‘dual broadcasting system' – being affected by new dynamism sparked particularly by the rise of the Internet. The increasing multiplicity of forms and possibilities of communication, in particular of ‘hybrid' coupling of elements of individual and mass communication (e.g. individual exchange of pieces of music by a generally accessible procedure such as Napster and Gnutella, Internet discussion groups among people who do not know each other, Video-on-Demand etc.) has brought broadcasting regulation within a ‘positive order' oriented towards ‘pluralism' under pressure. New hybrid services can no longer be sharply distinguished from broadcasting, nor simply classified with traditional individual communication. The content too may be disseminated in various contexts: for instance, the same film may be disseminated as a full programme, a side programme or part of a media service. Can the difference in context then justify, say, differentiation of legal requirements relating to advertising?

Postcolonial India's modernist ambition to have a Uniform Civil Code, impressively written into Article 44 of the Indian Constitution of 1950 as a non-justiciable Directive Principle of State Policy, concerns not just an Indian problem but a universal predicament for lawyers and legal systems. What is the relationship between personal status laws and general state-made laws? To what extent should the formal law allow for, or seek to restrain, the legal implications of religious and socio-cultural diversity? To what extent does a state, whether secular or not, actually have power and legitimacy to decree and enforce legal uniformity? There are many more agendas at play here than simply the central issue of legal authority, focused on the power of the law, or simply “religion” v. “law”, or “culture” v. “law”, as we are often still led to believe.

European integration has forced constitutional law scholars to abandon the perspective of methodological nationalism. Prior to the emergence of the interpretative problems raised by the intersection of domestic and European law, the dominant legal paradigm conceived of “constitution” and “state” as two inseparable terms. With the intensification of European integration and economic globalization, many different constitutionalist interpretations have emerged which all share a belief in the State's loss of centrality, such as post-, supra- and transnational constitutionalism, constitutionalism without the state and multilevel constitutionalism.

Since the very conception of the European integration, there has been one core question that has attracted much attention and yet it remains contested and in a way unanswered till present. What is the legal nature of the European integration - a query about what integration stands for (the descriptive dimension), how it is to be explained and construed (the explanatory dimension) and eventually what it should stand for (the normative dimension). With the lapse of time, and as integration has evolved, various legal, political, economical and even broader intellectual streams of mutually shared beliefs, we should call them narratives, have emerged all offering their own and separate visions of what constitutes the most appropriate answer. Among them, however, the constitutional narrative has come out as a sort of master or dominant narrative whose answers have reached and persuaded the widest circle of influential stakeholders with the greatest impact on the social construction of the European integration.

Of all anti-terror-laws adopted in Germany in the last thirty years, one of the most famous measures is certainly the so-called Kontaktsperregesetz, an Act introducing the possibility of incommunicado detention in the case of imminent terrorist threats. It is the prime example of how far reactive legislation can go, under the pretext to fight terrorism. This form of incommunicado detention was adopted in 1977, by introducing a new section (section 4, Sections 31–38) to the Introductory Act to the Judicature Act (Einführungsgesetz zum Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz, hereinafter EGGVG). The provisions were enacted in response to a particular terrorist incident, and have not been applied since. Surprisingly enough, in April 2006, a seemingly new provision was added to this regime (Section 38a EGGVG), however, as we will later see, this regulation is in fact not new, but has only changed its systematic position within the enormous legislative forest of Germany, and, at the same time, its legal nature (from transitory to permanent). Section 38a EGGVG extends the scope of application of incommunicado detention considerably, by allowing it to be used not only in terrorist cases, but also for other forms of criminal organizations like mafia. It thus increases the possibility of prisoners to be absolutely isolated from other inmates, family, friends, and even from their defense counsels, for up to thirty days; a period which can be prolonged for an indefinite period of time, provided that certain requirements are met.

For the first time, national provisions governing the quantification of respective compensation amounts due for public purposes expropriation and for unlawful expropriation were declared unconstitutional by the Italian Constitutional Court's decisions No. 348 and 349, issued on 24 October 2007, because they were in contrast with the international obligations stated in Protocol 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights (hereinafter the “ECvHR”), Article 1.

The destruction of the tower of Babylon led, or so we are told, to the emergence of different linguistic groups. Meant to be a punishment to mankind for having had the audacity to try to erect that tower, mankind has fervently embraced that punishment i.e. the resulting linguistic differences. Indeed, there is a body of legal scholarship promoting linguistic rights as constituting essential human rights. But there is another side to that story: it may well be considered that not so much the linguistic differences as such but the fervency of their embrace has been the real punishment.

In the summer of 2008, the EU Commission will present the draft regulation for a European private company. The Commission indicates by this announcement of the internal market commissioner, after prolonged hesitation that it wishes to comply with the urgent and detailed request of the European Parliament (EP) and to initiate the legislative process. Apparently, the arguments directed at the small and medium sized enterprises (SME) and their specific interests have now, after the EU parliamentarians, also convinced the Commission. In fact, the significance of this group of enterprises in the economy of the Community cannot be overestimated. The Commission therefore acts with appropriate responsibility in not confining itself to taking up the draft regulation prepared ten years ago by business practitioners and academic lawyers (CCIP/CNPF working group) but being prepared (as can be seen in the Consultation Paper of the General Directorate Internal Market of July 2007) to develop its own statute for a European private company. This paper is intended, mainly on the basis of that Consultation Paper but also on the basis of the EP resolution, to introduce the main issues and central regulatory elements of the new legal form of community law.

Without much doubt, the two great pillars of American scholarship on the German Basic Law and the jurisprudence of the Federal Constitutional Court are (in the order of first appearance) Donald Kommers's monumental casebook, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany and David Currie's magisterial treatise, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. Professor Kommers's comprehensive work was a milestone in a long career that has been very substantially devoted to the study of German constitutional law. In the late 1960s, Kommers spent a research year at the German Constitutional Court and, drawing in part on personal interviews with the justices, he published the first major work in English on that court. Since then, Kommers has produced a steady stream of significant works on German constitutional law.

In the western part of India, on the edge of the Thar Desert, a wealthy camel herdsman died, leaving his seventeen camels to his three sons. His final wishes distributed the camels to his heirs in specific proportions: one-half to the eldest, one-third to the middle son, and one-ninth to the youngest. The sons quickly appreciated the immediate obstacle to complying fully with their father's wishes. How could they make this specific distribution? They could not wait for the camels to breed; nor did they choose to sell them off and share the proceeds because herding camels was all they had ever known. Accordingly, they decided to consult their village leaders from the local panchayat. Seemingly uncertain of the appropriate solution, one of the five elders suggested that the boys accept a loan of one of his camels, go home, think it over again, and return the camel to him on the very next day. Disgruntled by the ostensible futility of this advice, they returned to their tent, under their breath cursing the stupidity of the old man.

While shaking their heads over tea, the youngest quickly rose in excitement. “Brothers,” he exclaimed, “we now have eighteen camels.” “So?!?,” the eldest mocked him, “we will have seventeen only tomorrow. What good will that do, you fool?!?” “But bhaya, with eighteen camels, we can divide them up according to the wishes of our papa: you get nine; our brother gets six; and I get two. That makes seventeen. We divide the herd, and give the eighteenth camel back to our elder!”

The Bologna Declaration of 19 June 1999, committed 29 European nations, including Germany, to develop a system of higher education

The universal and regional systems of human rights protection recognize that mothers find themselves in situations which require special protection. For instance, Article 10 para. 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stipulates that special protection should be accorded to mothers during a reasonable period before and after childbirth and that during such period working mothers should be accorded paid leave or leave with adequate social security benefits.

On January 15th 2008, it was precisely fifty years ago that the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) (Bundesverfassungsgericht) handed down its seminal decision in the Lüth case. The Lüth decision can be seen as a foundational moment for at least two transformative Post-War developments in constitutional thinking that continue to influence legal systems around the world.