Search Results (6)

When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature. Full article

The German Constitutional Court’s climate verdict provided a re-interpretation of core liberal-democratic concepts, and it is highly relevant for liberal constitutional law in general, including EU and international law—where similar issues are currently being discussed in ongoing trials before the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice. The present article applies a legal interpretation to analyse the national and transnational implications of the ruling. The results show that the verdict accepts human rights as intertemporal and globally applicable. It applies the precautionary principle to these rights and frees them from the misleading causality debate. However, the court failed to address the most important violations of human rights, it categorised climate policy as a greater threat to freedom than climate change, and the court failed to acknowledge that the Paris 1.5-degree limit implies a radically smaller carbon budget. Furthermore, little attention has so far been paid to the fact that the ruling implies an obligation for greater EU climate protection, especially since most emissions are regulated supranationally. Against this backdrop, the EU emissions trading system demands a reform, which has to go well beyond the existing EU proposals so as to enable societal transformations towards sustainability. Full article

This paper reviews the most recent literature on experiments with different Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques applied to predict judicial and administrative decisions. Among the most outstanding findings, we have that the most used data mining techniques are Support Vector Machine (SVM), K Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) and Random Forest (RF), and in terms of the most used deep learning techniques, we found Long-Term Memory (LSTM) and transformers such as BERT. An important finding in the papers reviewed was that the use of machine learning techniques has prevailed over those of deep learning. Regarding the place of origin of the research carried out, we found that 64% of the works belong to studies carried out in English-speaking countries, 8% in Portuguese and 28% in other languages (such as German, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, etc.). Very few works of this type have been carried out in Spanish-speaking countries. The classification criteria of the works have been based, on the one hand, on the identification of the classifiers used to predict situations (or events with legal interference) or judicial decisions and, on the other hand, on the application of classifiers to the phenomena regulated by the different branches of law: criminal, constitutional, human rights, administrative, intellectual property, family law, tax law and others. The corpus size analyzed in the reviewed works reached 100,000 documents in 2020. Finally, another important finding lies in the accuracy of these predictive techniques, reaching predictions of over 60% in different branches of law. Full article

This article studies the hidden blemishes of two benchmark rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In 2015 and 2018, the ECJ approved two unconventional monetary instruments, among others ‘Outright Monetary Transactions’ and the ‘Public Sector Purchase Program’. Yet, there is a vigorous debate about both monetary operations in law and economics. In this interdisciplinary article, we address law and economic arguments in order to elucidate insights to the legal community. In particular, we elaborate on the legal implications of a variety of concerning issues such as public policy interference, effect on wealth redistribution, erosion of democratic legitimacy and lack of effectiveness of monetary policy. These topics remain disregarded in the ECJ rulings. Consequently, the verdicts do not identify the economic boundaries of the European Central Bank’s mandate appropriately. Full article

Fertile soils form an important basis for survival for humans, but also for animals, plants and ecosystems, on which all terrestrial organisms rely. Soil is not only of central importance to the global provision of food and in the fight against hunger; climate, biological diversity and water bodies are also highly dependent on soil quality. Soil conservation is therefore a decisive factor in the survival of humanity. Pope Francis also emphasized this in his encyclical “Laudato si’”. However, increasing pressure is being exerted on soils, which poses an enormous challenge to the international community and thus also to the church. Against this background, in this article, which is based on a Memorandum of the German Bishops’ Working Group on Ecological Issues, arguments and justifications for soil protection and sustainable soil management are developed from different angles—from a creation-ethical, a legal, and an economic perspective. All three perspectives point in the same direction, namely that in the use of soils public interests that serve the society and the environment should be given priority over private interests. These arguments may serve as an important reference point in political and societal debates about soils, and may support strategies for sustainable soil management. Full article

Few European lawmakers have analyzed the implications of Muslim headscarf bans for equal employment opportunity. EU anti-discrimination directives suggest that contradictory member-state approaches will eventually invoke a judicial Community response at national expense. Drawing on the bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) standard, this study compares the “judicial cultures” of the U.S. Supreme Court, the German Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). It argues that while the ECJ initially invoked Roman law precepts shared by a majority of its member-states through the 1980s, it has come to embrace Anglo-American norms stressing individual freedoms over state interests. Given their strong support for equal treatment and social inclusion, EU justices will be more likely than member-state or ECHR judges to overturn existing bans on hejab at the workplace, once such a case makes its way onto the ECJ docket. Full article