Law Commons^™

In Defense Of Its Identity, Daniel H. Halberstam, Werner Schroeder

Articles

The Court of Justice has spoken. The Commission may now, under Regulation 2020/2092, withhold monies from Member States that do not observe the rule of law. This “budget conditionality”, if wielded smartly, should prove a powerful tool if comparative experience coaxing states through union money to follow union policies holds true in Europe. Given the limitations of national reference actions and infringement proceedings that lag behind the nefarious strategies of some governments, and the political obstacles to using Article 7 TEU, we cheer on this new tool of the Union. But we believe the urgency of rule of law concerns …

Eia Directive Procedural Guarantees As Substantive Individual Rights In Il V. Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, Alexis Haddock

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Environmental impact assessments serve as a necessary tool for attaining the goals of the Aarhus Convention and the EIA Directive (2011/92). The Aarhus Convention and EIA Directive aim to guarantee the public’s right to participate in environmental decision-making, to be provided information necessary to effectively participate, and to have access to a procedure to challenge a decision. The ECJ’s recent case IL v. Land Nordrhein-Westfalen articulates the current interpretation of the European Union Member States’ obligations under the EIA Directive to provide individuals standing to challenge impact assessment decisions. This opinion reaffirmed that in cases where the procedural defect did …

Pushing Back On Stricter Copyright Isp Liability Rules, Pamela Samuelson

Michigan Technology Law Review

For more than two decades, internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States, the European Union (EU), and many other countries have been shielded from copyright liability under “safe harbor” rules. These rules apply to ISPs who did not know about or participate in user-uploaded infringements and who take infringing content down after receiving notice from rights holders. Major copyright industry groups were never satisfied with these safe harbors, and their dissatisfaction has become more strident over time as online infringements have grown to scale.

Responding to copyright industry complaints, the EU in 2019 adopted its Directive on Copyright and …

Understanding National Remedies And The Principle Of National Procedural Autonomy: A Constitutional Approach, Daniel H. Halberstam

Articles

This article provides a constitutionally grounded understanding of the vexing principle of ‘national procedural autonomy’ that haunts the vindication of EU law in national court. After identifying tensions and confusion in the debate surrounding this purported principle of ‘autonomy’, the Article turns to the foundational text and structure of Union law to reconstruct the proper constitutional basis for deploying or supplanting national procedures and remedies. It further argues that much of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union may be considered through the lens of ‘prudential avoidance’, ie the decision to avoid difficult constitutional questions …

Digitizing Scent And Flavor: A Copyright Perspective, Amara Lopez

Michigan Technology Law Review

Should the flavor of a cheese fall under copyright protection? The Court of Justice of the European Union recently confronted this question in Levola Hengelo BV v. Smilde Foods. Although the court ultimately denied protection, its reasoning opened many doors for those seeking intellectual property protection for scents and flavors. The court implied that it was the subjective nature of a cheese flavor that bars it from enjoying the protection copyright affords, which begs the question of what would happen if there were a sufficiently objective way to describe a flavor.

Recent developments in technology have led to the digitization …

Should The United States Adopt Crs?, Noam Noked

Michigan Law Review Online

The United States' one-sided approach to tax transparency might lead to an unprecedented clash with the European Union (EU) in the near future. In light of the EU's deadline for the United States, the U.S. Treasury and Congress should urgently engage in a discussion on whether the United States should adopt the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) for automatic exchange of financial account information. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office considered this issue and did not recommend adopting CRS. This Essay discusses the contents of the report, as well as important considerations that were left out of the …

Should Shareholders Be Rewarded For Loyalty? European Experiments On The Wedge Between Tenured Voting And Takeover Law, Chiara Mosca

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Corporate law reveals its democratic background when it comes to the general meetings of shareholders, finding, on both sides of the Atlantic, its most tangible expression in the “one share, one vote” principle. While, in the political landscape, the “one person, one vote” standard is absolute dogma and weighting votes according to people’s preferences and interests has never proved feasible, in the corporate scenario the one share, one vote principle is constantly challenged by the incentives of companies and their shareholders to shape corporate rights according to specific needs. In this respect, some legislators (specifically in France and Italy) have …

A Fresh View On The Hard/Soft Law Divide: Implications For International Insolvency Of Enterprise Groups, Irit Mevorach

Michigan Journal of International Law

It is the orthodox belief that treaties and—within the EU—directly applicable regulations represent hard, binding international law, while other international instruments—including model laws—are forms of soft law. In a previous publication(The Future of Cross-Border Insolvency: Overcoming Biases and Closing Gaps), I discussed how the traditional distinction between hard and soft law is less firm, due particularly to economic and behavioural implications of instrument choice and design. Building on that analysis, this Article focuses on the new rules for the international insolvency of enterprise groups in the Recast EU Insolvency Regulation 2015 (the “EIR”) and in the forthcoming UNCITRAL model law …

Fundamental Rights, Federal States, And Sovereignty: Some Random Remarks, Donald H. Regan

Articles

I am not an EU lawyer. The days are long gone when I could know a substantial fraction of EU law just by knowing about the free movement of goods. I get a fleeting glimpse of where the EU is going every year at the Jean Monnet Seminar in Dubrovnik, but no more than a glimpse. Still, when the editors invited me to write this Editorial Note, I could not refuse. Looking for inspiration, I read or reread all the previous twelve Notes. This was an enjoyable and informative exercise in itself, but only a few of the essays suggested …

Brexit And The Wto: What Happens Next, Andrea Xu

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

In the summer of 2016, the United Kingdom (the “UK”) announced its decision to leave the European Union (the “EU”). This decision, more commonly known as “Brexit,” subsequently stirred British politics, which included Theresa May replacing David Cameron as Prime Minister. Brexit created a unique situation in European and global politics, and instigated a discussion among politicians, academics, economists, and the likes about how the UK will leave the EU and Brexit’s implications in the UK, Europe, and the world as a whole.

This Note analyzes one specific aspect of Brexit: the administrative procedures the UK must undergo to establish …

Emotions In The Early Common Law (C. 1166–1215), John Hudson

Articles

Beyond dealing with wrongdoing and litigation, law has many other functions. It can be designed to make life more predictable, it can facilitate and promote certain actions, it can seek to prevent disputes by laying down rules, and provide routes to solutions other than litigation should disputes arise. All of these can have connections to matters of emotion. Using both lawbooks and records of cases from the Angevin period, the present article begins by looking at issues of land law rather than crime, and at law outside rather than inside court. It then returns to crime and litigation before exploring …

The European Union's Human Rights Obligations Towards Distant Strangers, Aravind Ganesh

Michigan Journal of International Law

Section I begins by setting out certain provisions added by the Lisbon Treaty requiring the European Union to promote human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in all its “relations with the wider world.” Section II then recounts a recent interpretation of these provisions, which understands them primarily as mandating compliance with international law, and thus largely denies extraterritorial human rights obligations to protect. While the fundamentals of this “compliance” reading are correct, Section III demonstrates that the notion of international law involved here entertains an expansive view of prescriptive jurisdiction, that is, a political institution’s authority to prescribe …

Formalism And Functionalism In Antitrust Treatment Of Loyalty Rebates: A Comparative Perspective, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

It is a widely held belief that U.S. antitrust law has long been characterized by economic functionalism and that European antitrust law has long been characterized by legal formalism.' The received wisdom began to change in Europe a decade ago when the Directorate General Competition of the European Commission (DG Comp) began to advocate a more "effects-based" analysis of abuse of dominance. Two factors arguably contributed to this change. First, the DG Comp became increasingly influenced by economists who had little use for the old formalism. Second, as Europe trie to spread antitrust to developing antitrust regimes across the world-and, …

Opinion 2/13 Of The Court (C.J.E.U.), Daniel Halberstam

Articles

Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the draft agreement on European Union accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) incompatible with the Treaty on European Union. The Opinion comes toward the end of a long and gradual process of incorporating human and fundamental rights principles into the legal system of the European Community and its successor, the European Union. Opinion 2/13 sends the Commission back to the drawing board on what has long been seen as the capstone of that process—EU accession to the Strasbourg human rights regime as an external …

Privacy Almighty? The Cjeu's Judgment In Google Spain Sl V. Aepd, David J. Stute

Michigan Journal of International Law

The Internet has matured into an unprecedented repository of data, retrievable through myriad unique “links,” or Uniform Resource Locators. Yet, this wealth of information only became broadly accessible through the invention and continual development of algorithm-based search engines. Keyword searches empowered search-engine users to find—and sometimes stumble upon—information with great ease. Indeed, search-engine indices arguably have become the most comprehensive catalogues of information the world has ever seen. This wealth of accessible information poses challenges to traditional notions of privacy: aspects of our private and public lives, which previously would have rarely left the vicinities of our immediate social or …

Measures With Multiple Purposes: Puzzles From Ec-Seal Products, Donald H. Regan

Articles

European Communities—Measures Prohibiting the Importation and Marketing of Seal Products is the first case in which the dispute system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has wrestled with a regulation that pursued multiple conflicting, legitimate purposes. (I will explain later why Brazil—Retreaded Tyres is not such a case.) This generates puzzles about applying the definition of a “technical regulation” to complex measures; about whether an exception to a ban can be justified by a purpose different from that of the ban; and about how to apply “less restrictive alternative” analysis to measures with multiple goals. The first of these puzzles …

Finding, Sharing And Risk Of Loss: Of Whales, Bees And Other Valuable Finds In Iceland, Denmark And Norway, William I. Miller, Helle Vogt

Articles

The focus of the paper is twofold: the first part is about how property rights were assigned and ranked in finds, both in those items such as bees, rings and other valuables which were previously owned, and also in those things, like whales, which were unowned. We focus on Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian laws from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet most of the provisions were copied into later laws and were in force up until modern times, some even current now. The second part treats the question of how risks of loss were handled, and how simple forms of …

The Incitement Of Terrorism On The Internet: Legal Standards, Enforcement, And The Role Of The European Union, Ezekiel Rediker

Michigan Journal of International Law

Consider this sentence: “The Shining Path is a heroic organization.” Over the past thirty years, the Shining Path has waged a violent guerilla war against the Peruvian government, prompting the European Union to designate the group as a terrorist organization. In certain European countries, speech inciting or glorifying terrorist organizations is criminalized. As a result, citizens risk prosecution if they do not carefully limit what they say about the Shining Path, or other terrorist organizations. But where does free speech end and incitement to terrorism begin? The debate over free speech and incitement to terrorism is actively being played out …

Can The Eu Be A Constitutional System Without Universal Access To Judical Review, Brian Libgober

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Comment engages with a central dilemma about the legal order of the European Union: is the EU a constitutional system, a treaty system, or a hybrid system for which we must develop a new conceptual vocabulary? Besides intrinsic interest, resolving this categorization problem is important for deciding a number of issues in European Union law. For example, are legal strategies that are normally available to parties in international law viable in the European legal order? Should Community law be supreme over national law? If so, what limits should be placed on that supremacy, and “who should have the ultimate …

It's The Autonomy, Stupid!' A Modest Defense Of Opinion 2/13 On Eu Accession To The Echr, And The Way Forward, Daniel H. Bicket

Articles

The Court of Justice of the European Union has arrived! Gone are the days of hagiography, when in the eyes of the academy and informed observers the Court could do no wrong. The pendulum has finally swung the other way. The judicial darling, if there is one today, is Strasbourg, not Luxembourg. Not hours had passed before the Court's 258-paragraph long Opinion 2/13 on the Draft Agreement on EU Accession to the European Convention on Human Rights was condemned as “exceptionally poor.” Critical voices have mounted steadily ever since, leading to nothing short of widespread “outrage.”

The International Human Rights Regime And Supranational Regional Organizations: The Challenge Of The Eu, Pauline Hilmy

Michigan Journal of International Law

The global legal order as we know it today developed largely to accommodate and facilitate the modern state system that arose in the wake of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. As a result, international law consists primarily of international agreements1 and customary rules arising out of state practice and recognition.2 States still remain the primary subjects of international law today, but they are increasingly joined by other actors on the global stage, including international organizations and individuals–and the global legal order has struggled to adapt and adjust.

Reconstructing The Effective Control Criterion In Extraterritorial Human Rights Breaches: Direct Attribution Of Wrongfulness, Due Diligence, And Concurrent Responsibility, Vassilis P. Tzevelekos

Michigan Journal of International Law

As one of the core elements of statehood, territory is inextricably linked to sovereignty. For this reason, jurisdiction is primarily territorial. In principle, the sphere of power of the sovereign state—including its competence to exercise legislative, judicial, and executive authority—applies within the confines of its own territory. Otherwise, the state risks interfering with the sovereignty of other states and thereby breaking one of the fundamental principles of Public International Law (PIL), that of sovereign equality. The principle of sovereign equality dictates that all assertions of jurisdiction have to be balanced with the sovereign rights of other states. This is why …

Beyond Carve-Outs And Toward Reliance: A Normative Framework For Cross-Border Insolvency Choice Of Law, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The title of this Article purports to develop a normative framework for cross-border insolvency choice of law. That can be a task of varying scope, so at the outset any pretense of ambition for a wholly new choice of law model should be dispelled. Indeed, at the most generalized level, bankruptcy choice of law theory has already been fully ventilated in the well-rehearsed universalism versus territorialism debates. And it has been settled. The universalists, at least as a normative matter, appear to have won: choice of law, as it is increasingly accepted, should be determined by the debtor's center of …

Internal Legitimacy And Europe's Piecemeal Constitution: Reflections On Van Gend At 50, Daniel H. Halberstam

Book Chapters

Europe is often said to lack a proper constitution of the radical American kind. That may be so, but there is a different, more promising sense in which Europe might be following the very best of the constitutional tradition.

A Betrayed Ideal: The Problem Of Enforcement Of Eu Sex Equality Guarantees In The Cee Post-Socialist Legal Systems, Goran Selanec

SJD Dissertations

The notion of equality between men and women has, for a long time, played a significant role in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The ideal was particularly important during the period of “real” or “really existing” socialism in CEE. For the CEE socialist regimes, the ideal of equality was an ideological banner that supposedly demonstrated their moral superiority to the “West”. The ideal has gained new importance in recent years, when the CEE post-socialist states had to commit to the protection of the notion of equality between sexes as a condition of their membership in the European …

Local, Global And Plural Constitutionalism: Europe Meets The World., Daniel Halberstam

Book Chapters

The idea that constitutionalism is central to the legitimate exercise of public power has dominated the modern liberal imagination since the Enlightenment. The ideal of limited collective self-governance has spawned a rich and highly diverse tradition of hard-fought national constitutions from the time of the Glorious Revolution into the present. Today, however, constitutionalism faces its greatest challenge yet: the question of its continued relevance to modern governance. With the explosion of governance beyond the state, many wonder whether constitutionalism as we know it is being marginalized or altogether undermined.

Eric Stein (1913-2011), Daniel Halberstam, Steven Ratner, Mathias Reimann

Articles

On July 28,2011, Eric Stein, pillar of international law, pioneer of the legal study of European integration, and master of comparative law, passed away in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was ninety-eight years old. He joined this Journal's Board of Editors in 1963, serving as a regular member until 1978, and thereafter as an honorary editor. Stein was the last of that great generation of European-educated jurists who fled Nazism and became leading figures in comparative and international law in the United States.

Rethinking Merger Efficiencies, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The two leading merger systems-those of the United States and the European Union-treat the potential benefits and risks of mergers asymmetrically. Both systems require considerably greater proof of efficiencies than they do of potential harms if the efficiencies are to offset concerns over the accumulation or exercise of market power The implicit asymmetry principle has important systemic effects for merger control. It not only stands in the way of some socially desirable mergers but also may indirectly facilitate the clearance of some socially undesirable mergers. Neither system explicitly justifies this asymmetry, and none of the plausible justifications are normatively supportable. …

Trafficking In Europe: An Analysis Of The Effectiveness Of European Law, Saadiya Chaudary

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Essay looks at the manifestation of various forms of human trafficking within Europe and analyzes the effectiveness of current European law provisions in combating trafficking and protecting victims. The Essay will accomplish this by examining recent and current cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the comparative gap between European standards and domestic procedures in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a well-known destination state for trafficking victims' and consequently is required to meet obligations under international law toward a significant number of individuals who have been forced into exploitation in the United Kingdom.

Islam In The Secular Nomos Of The European Court Of Human Rights, Peter G. Danchin

Michigan Journal of International Law

If, with the benefit of hindsight, Mr. Choudhury's case was a harbinger of the emergence of various problems associated with Islam and the rights of Muslim minorities in European nation-states, then the events of September 11, 2001 have propelled these issues to the forefront of law and politics in a way unimaginable even a decade earlier. In Denmark, cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a suicide bomber have been published leading to protests and violence across Europe and the Islamic world; a law prohibiting students in public schools from wearing symbols or attire through which they conspicuously exhibit a …