European Law Commons^™

Enhancing The Transparency Dialogue In The “Santiago Principles” For Sovereign Wealth Funds, Adam D. Dixon

Seattle University Law Review

The financial crisis ultimately caused Western governments to welcome sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investment as a way to put a floor under collapsing markets and to provide a set of voluntary principles that would underwrite SWFs’ claim to legitimacy in the international community. In the autumn of 2007, then U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund, convened the International Working Group of SWFs (IWG) to draft a set of generally accepted principles and practices. These principles are referred to as the “Santiago Principles.” The implicit objective of these twenty-four voluntary principles is to promote greater …

Slides: Thoughts On Regulatory Mechanisms For Natural Resource Development: Alternatives To Command And Control, Including A Look At Open Source Approaches, Stanley Dempsey

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: Stanley Dempsey, Chairman, Royal Gold

17 slides

Recent Reforms In Eu Law: Recognition And Enforcement Of Judgments, Samuel P. Baumgartner

Akron Law Faculty Publications

The European Union has just adopted a set of amendments to the Brussels I Regulation, which governs jurisdiction to adjudicate, parallel proceedings, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. This article discusses the Regulation and the adopted amendments regarding the recognition and enforcement of judgments and argues that these amendments are part of a deeper set of structural and conceptual changes in the law of transnational litigation in the European Union over the last two decades. The article concludes with an analysis of both the amendments and the underlying changes for litigants and law reformers in the United States, …

Intellectual Property, The Free Movement Of Goods And Trade Restraint In The European Union, Jarrod Tudor

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The European Union (“EU”) is the most significant trade partner of the United States. Trading in goods protected by intellectual property rights remains a challenge for American business entities as they are forced to sift through a myriad of law consisting of the federal intellectual property law of the EU and the intellectual property law of the member states. The European Court of Justice (“ECJ” or “the Court”) has been faced with dozens of complex cases arising out of conflicts between the national law of the member states and the Articles of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European …

Germany Vs. Europe: The Principle Of Democracy In German Constitutional Law And The Troubled Future Of European Integration, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

This Article introduces the Demokratieprinzip. In Part II, I begin by more fully documenting the Euro-skeptical turn in Germany's relationship with Europe, paying particular attention to the central role played by the Constitutional Court's interpretation of the Demokratieprinzip. Part III, in four subparts, provides a doctrinal introduction to the principle of democracy. First, I map the principle's bases in the text of the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law or Constitution). Second, I present the gloss the Constitutional Court has given the principle, making special reference to the Court's recent decisions involving challenges to Germany's participation in measures seeking to advance European …

Breach Notification Requirements Under The European Union Legal Framework: Convergence, Conflicts, And Complexity In Compliance, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 317 (2014), Samson Esayas

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

The European Union (EU) legal landscape on data privacy and information security is undergoing significant changes. A prominent legislative development in recent years is the introduction of breach notification requirements within a number of regulatory instruments. In only the past two years, the Community legislator has adopted, and proposed, four different regulatory instruments containing breach notification requirements. There are also existing requirements for the telecom sector. This creates a complex mesh of regulatory frameworks for breach notification where different aspects of the same breach within the same company might have to be dealt with under different regulatory instruments, making compliance …

Marxist And Soviet Law, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter addresses both the Marxist critique of law before the Russian Revolution and the development of the Soviet Law Structure. It discusses the three main trends in Soviet Criminal Law before elucidating how these trends affected the General Part and the Special Part of Soviet Criminal Codes and overall Soviet criminal policy.

Law And Fiction In Medieval Iceland: The Story In The Gragas Manuscripts, Thomas J. Mcsweeney

Studio for Law and Culture

Medieval Icelandic law has been appropriated for modern purposes as diverse as creating a history for European democracy and proving that a libertarian legal system can work in practice. It has been put to so many modern uses because it presents us with a picture of the Icelandic Commonwealth (ca. 930-1262) as a society of free and relatively equal farmers who operated with no king, no nobility, and minimal government. The laws represent Iceland as an exceptional polity, strikingly different from the monarchies and hierarchical societies that dominated Western Europe in the middle ages. This exceptionalism resonates strongly with modern …

Data Protection In The European Union: A Closer Look At The Current Patchwork Of Data Protection Laws And The Proposed Reform That Could Replace Them All, Christina Glon

Faculty Articles

Laws protecting a European's right to control the flow of their own personal data (also known as "data privacy") date back as early as 1950. In the 65 years since the Council of Europe declared that every person has the fundamental "right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence," a patchwork of conventions, directives, treaties and communications have been created to ensure the ongoing protection of this right. However, in recent years, this patchwork approach has been unable to keep up with the pace of technology and has created confusion and concern for the …

A Glass Half Full: Corporate And State Responsibilities Under Economic And Social Rights During The On-Going European Financial Crisis, Jernej L. Černič

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

No abstract provided.

Interstate Conflict And Cooperation In Criminal Cases: An American Perspective, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last decade, the European Union has adopted legislation that calls for the mutual recognition of arrest warrants, investigation orders, and penal judgments. These laws have aimed to strengthen the Union’s response to transnational crime, and EU policymakers are currently considering legislation to further harmonize the Union's law enforcement efforts. This Article compares these developments within the EU to the U.S. legal framework on mutual recognition in criminal matters. It examines the individual, state and systemic interests that U.S. state courts have considered in deciding whether to recognize other states' judgments, warrants, or investigative actions. These competing interests have …

Microfinance: An Engine For Gobal Economic Growth, Tyler Gurss

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Charitable Giving, Tax Expenditures, And Direct Spending In The United States And The European Union, Lilian V. Faulhaber

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article compares the ways in which the United States and the European Union limit the ability of state-level entities to subsidize their own residents, whether through direct subsidies or through tax expenditures. It uses four recent charitable giving cases decided by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to illustrate the ECJ’s evolving tax expenditure jurisprudence and argues that, while this jurisprudence may suggest a new and promising model for fiscal federalism, it may also have negative social policy implications. It also points out that the court analyzes direct spending and tax expenditures under different rubrics despite their economic equivalence …

Household Regulation And European Integration: The Family Portrait Of A Crisis, Philomila Tsoukala

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the regulation of the household and its effects on the economy. Incorporating insights from family economics, comparative family law, legal realism, political economy and feminism, it describes the array of different legal regimes that can affect household composition and function. The article then analyzes the case of Greece using this framework. It argues that the role of households organized as families was a central element in the Greek debt crisis, overlooked by scholars and policymakers alike. It identifies the host of legal regimes that helped consolidate families as the main providers of …

Pringle And The Nature Of Legal Reasoning, Paul Craig

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Pringle judgment generated significant academic comment, concerning all aspects of the case. It raises, as will be seen, broader issues as to the nature of legal reasoning and the role played therein by text and background purpose or teleology.

Gunnar Beck is very critical of the CJEU, castigating it for reasoning that is said to be absurd, and accusing it of crossing the line between legal reasoning and political judgment. He is also critical of much academic analysis of the case, contending that this was too uncritical of the Court's judgment, and contending also that the interpretation of the …

Exporting Standards: The Externalization Of The Eu's Regulatory Power Via Markets, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the unprecedented and deeply underestimated global power that the EU is exercising through its legal institutions and standards, and how it successfully exports that influence to the rest of the world. Introducing the notion of “the Brussels Effect,” the Article shows how market forces alone are sufficient to convert EU standards into global standards. Without the need to use international institutions or seek other nations’ cooperation, the EU has a strong and growing ability to promulgate regulations that become entrenched in the legal frameworks of developed and developing markets alike, leading to a notable “Europeanization” of many …

Global Experimentalist Governance, Grainne De Burca, Robert O. Keohane, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

This article outlines the concept of Global Experimentalist Governance (GXG). GXG is an institutionalized transnational process of participatory and multilevel problem solving, in which particular problems, and the means of addressing them, are framed in an open-ended way, and subjected to periodic revision by various forms of peer review in light of locally generated knowledge. GXG differs from other forms of international organization and transnational governance, and is emerging in various issue areas. The Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances is used to illustrate how GXG functions. The conditions for the emergence of GXG are specified, as well as some of …

The Mirror Image Of Asylums And Prisons, Sacha Raoult, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes trends in prison rates and mental hospital rates in France since the earliest available statistics. It shows that, on almost two centuries of data and amidst an agitated political history, every asylum trend in France is "countered" by an inverse prison trend, and vice-versa. Both trends are like a mirror image of each other. We reflect on the possible explanations for this intriguing fact and show that the most obvious ones (a population transfer or a building transfer) are not able to account for most of the relationship. After these explanations have been dismissed, we are left …

The Data Surveillance State In Europe And The United States, Joel R. Reidenberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Courts As Agents Of Legal Change: Evidence From Lgbt Rights In Europe, Laurence R. Helfer, Erik Voeten

Faculty Scholarship

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? The authors develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. The authors examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new dataset that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. The …

Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

It is an honor to introduce this special issue of the Columbia Journal of European Law devoted to the legal method of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). That the issue consists of a single article should come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with Judge Koen Lenaerts, whose keen appreciation of the workings of the Court is quite simply unrivaled.

Merger Control Procedures And Institutions: A Comparison Of The Eu And Us Practice, William E. Kovacic, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

The objective of this paper is to discuss and compare the role that different constituencies play in US and EU procedures for merger control. We describe the main constituencies (both internal and external) involved in merger control in both jurisdictions and discuss how a typical merger case would be handled under these procedures. At each stage, we consider how the procedure unfolds, which parties are involved, and how they can affect the procedure. Our discussion reveals a very different ecology. EU and US procedures differ in terms of their basic design and in terms of the procedures that are naturally …