The first real casualty of Germany's burgeoning Mad-Cow crisis must be the great pride Germany takes in its reputably efficient, high quality and “green” agriculture industry. The second and third casualties were the Federal Ministers of Agriculture and Public Health, both of whom recently handed over their resignations to Chancellor Schroeder under sharp criticism that they ignored the potential for a German Mad-Cow crisis, which broke when the first German cases were registered in late November, 2000. Hundreds of beef cattle will meet a similar, premature end. We must wait to learn whether German consumers will become casualties of the crisis.

Even throughout a global pandemic, climate change continues to be a fiercely discussed topic—both politically and legally—the world over. Particularly in light of the many Covid-19 related financial aid programs (including transnational ones) and the associated economic stabilization and reconstruction plans, a sustainable climate policy and legal order should be expected to play a role for an economy that has fallen into a slump. Nevertheless, a lively discussion on how best to achieve climate protection continues to take place in already established systems such as the private law system. Here, as far as climate change is concerned, tort law appears to be the focus of these discussions. The extent to which tort law and the issue of climate change can be brought together is also increasingly being discussed in Germany. This article attempts to shed light on the questions of how tort law could contribute to the mitigation of climate change and how climate change could fit into the law of torts of the German civil law legal system.

Professor Joseph Weiler will soon stand trial for criminal libel in France for refusing to remove a book review from a website associated with an academic journal for which he serves as editor. His case has disturbing implications for all those who write, edit, and publish critical scholarly work. In this article, I explore those implications for Canadian scholars at home and as members of a global scholarly community. I assess the likelihood of success of a similar complaint under Canadian defamation law, and I consider the impact of libel chill and libel tourism. I conclude that although the defendant in such a case would have a good chance of prevailing under Canadian law through the defense of fair comment, a threat to academic freedom remains that requires action on the part of individuals and institutions committed to its preservation and enhancement.

This reflective article maps out the findings of a socio-legal study on language use in administrative settings in Belgium’s Dutch-language area. It explains how the author arrived at a socio-legal approach to this study object. Thereafter the article focuses on the methods used and the conceptual framework. It discusses the various methodological choices regarding data collection and the use of methods stemming from anthropology in this study. It also illustrates how anthropological literature on concepts such as discretion and multiple embeddedness provide conceptual tools for building a framework around which to structure and present the empirical data.

The last part of the article sketches the findings of this socio-legal study. Drawing on the conceptual framework, it illustrates that even when practice deviates from statutory law, the relationship between the law and the practice cannot be easily captured in a dichotomic relationship. The author furthermore deduces some relevant findings in light of general human rights. The article concludes with some reflections on research that combines law and anthropology, both as separate disciplines and as a combined endeavor.

Having gone through an international process on status settlement, in the aftermath of the proclamation of independence, the Kosovo Assembly adopted a Constitution and a range of essential laws. One of the very basic laws adopted in the aftermath of independence is the Law on the Constitutional Court. The Ahtisaari Commission had given a singular importance to the latter, having seen the Kosovan Constitutional Court as one of the most important guarantors of democracy in constitutional terms. In an Ahtisaarian view, the Kosovan Constitutional Court is, inter alia, thought of as a guarantor of the ethnic communities' constitutional rights. As a result, the law concerned along with the Constitution of Kosovo determined the organization and functioning of the Kosovo Constitutional Court.

On 22 June 2010, the Landgericht Frankfurt (Oder) (Regional Court) ruled on whether a hotel was entitled to deny a member of a nationalist party entrance to its establishment because of the individual's political beliefs or whether such discriminatory conduct constituted an illegal violation of the personality right of that person which would constitute a tort under § 823 of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (German Civil Code, “BGB”). In making its decision, the Court balanced a property owner's freedom of autonomy, specifically the owner's right to ban a customer from his or her establishment, against the customer's personal rights. Furthermore, the Court considered whether a hotel owner's decision to ban a customer based on his or her political beliefs violated the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (General Equal Treatment Law, “AGG”). Considering the fundamental question of balancing competing interests, of the personal right of the customer and the right of the property owner, and the national public debate concerning the right of members of nationalistic parties to be treated equally, the case goes beyond the interests of the parties involved and is of general importance.

This Article argues that distributional concerns constitute the heart of environmental regulation; they are not restricted to pre-policy values or post-policy effects that need to dealt with. On the contrary, they characterize the selection of environmental policies, and their properties. Different interests, preferences, and values with respect to a policy instrument can be made commensurable using the language of distribution. The centrality of distribution as an organizing principle may be elusive on account of it being too vaguely construed or too narrowly defined. This necessitates the articulation of a typology of distributional concerns. To this end, it is suggested that the distribution of benefits and burdens, distribution of responsibility, distribution of membership and distribution of capabilities could be useful categories to develop and assess environmental regulation. This framework is then applied to an unsuspecting candidate, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

The concept of rupture straddles the space between revolution and reform, anarchy and order—a paradoxical term to demarcate, on the one hand, the possibility of a complete falling away of one systematization, without necessarily initiating some new regime, and on the other hand, the conditions of improvement and renewal, an opportunity of reassessment, and quite often re-entrenchment. Thus, rupture is not necessarily the same as speaking about revolution, or even emancipation for that matter, because it does not necessitate any giving up of a certain system of ideas or authority, at least not in any longstanding sense. To put it bluntly, it is neither progressive nor reactionary, but in some sense, perhaps best understood, and I will expand on this shortly, as simply the very conditions of establishing and/or maintaining any symbolic order (by which I mean the albeit uneasy synthesis of political, social, economic, religious relationships that constitute what ends up getting called a ‘system’ or ‘order'). Rupture is a strategy, in other words, of both understanding and political action, but which itself carries no necessary affiliation with any ideological disposition. We might say, therefore, to speak of rupture is to enlist a set of concerns, disagreements, traditions, ideas, and so on, that are useful when attempting not just to describe a situation, but to move towards some political decision as a group, though what exactly that would be is open to contestation.

“A harmonious society needs a stronger legal system that wields greater authority.”

“He,” the Chinese character for harmony, is now in everyone's mind when thinking about contemporary China. Harmony and other ‘Confucian values’ seem to have penetrated all spheres of Chinese society, from the Communist Party's elite to business leaders and academics. But Confucius is both used and abused: quoting the philosopher at the start of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in a kitsch historical extravaganza featuring 3,000 men dressed up as his disciples does not clarify the true political meaning of an increasingly ideologically eclectic regime. On the contrary, it leads, to borrow Claude Lefort's term, to further “complications.” Thus, the interest in the idea of a ‘socialist harmonious society’ stems less from what it holds aloft than from what it hides.

Following a three-year investigation, on August 30, 2016, the European Commission (EC) released its decision in the Ireland-Apple State aid case. The EC found that Ireland had breached the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union because the manner in which Ireland had determined the tax payable by two Apple subsidiaries was not consistent with the arm's length principle and/or it was not based on objective criteria. This meant that Ireland had selectively favored Apple and provided the firm with State aid. The EC decision provides an example of how aggressive multinational enterprise (MNE) tax minimization is anti-competitive. The Ireland-Apple case also provides an illustration of how a lack of transparency and incoherency in MNE definition contribute to aggressive MNE tax minimization. States' reactions to the EC decision are further telling because they show how MNE tax minimization engages the self-interest of States. This suggests that efforts to combat aggressive MNE tax minimization, such as the OECD's Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting Action Plan, face complex State motivations in effecting change on the international level. Profit haven States have the most to lose if MNE tax minimization is effectively addressed. In addition, MNE home States may be at times loath to support changes to the system which favors “their” MNEs at the expense of other States' tax revenues. It is as if some home States view MNEs as their privateers, with such MNEs operating internationally under the tacit approval of their home States to aggressively avoid paying taxes to other countries. Home State leadership may be mistaken in thinking that MNE tax minimization is in their favor because MNEs are largely free agents and aggressive MNE tax minimization is dearly costing nearly all states.

The European Commission's White Paper on European Governance has attracted numerous critical comments. Some scholars seem to suggest that the whole project was over ambitious and doomed to failure from the outset, since the Commission could not complete the project without calling into question its own functional self understanding. Broadly speaking, most of the comments in the White Paper draw attention to the neglect of what is considered the European Union's core problem, that is the presumed lack of democratic legitimacy.

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide when more than 800,000 people were slaughtered within 100 days under the watch of the international community. As the United Nations has since acknowledged, “[t]he international community did not prevent the genocide, nor did it stop the killing once the genocide had begun.” The whole world failed the victims – a failure the UN Report called a fundamental “failure of the international community [and] failure of the United Nations system as a whole.” Those who could did little or nothing to help. Indeed, some actively concealed or denied the unfolding genocide. Interestingly, the genocide took place more than half a century after the victorious allies of World War II vowed “Never Again!” to genocide in response to the Nazi holocaust. Also, by 1994 the 1948 Convention on the Punishment and the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide under which states assumed a legal duty to prevent and punish the crime of genocide was nearly half a century old.

For some months now and with special intensity in the past few weeks, a battle over legal process – what may or may not the United States do militarily in Iraq without new authorization from the UN Security Council, and at what stage and under what conditions should a Council resolution give such authorization? – has simultaneously become a battle over what words in a resolution will be sufficient to count as implicit authorization. The current diplomatic discourse around a new Iraq resolution is focussing on one or more “hidden triggers” in the draft text presented by the US on October 21.

This year's 6th Joint Conference held by the American and Dutch Societies of International Law and organised by the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague focused on the increasing importance of the role of non-state actors in international law and at the same time provided an opportunity for American and European lawyers to address recent differences between the U.S. and Europe, e.g. on the use of force in Iraq. Consequently one of the three major issues of the conference was the response to international terrorism, while other issues included the role of international organizations as well as transnational corporations in international law.