The Bremen Regional Court is located in a monumental building – the Altes Gerichtshaus (Old Courthouse). A stone slab has adorned its facade since time immemorial. It has been placed directly under the jury courtroom – where the capital crimes come to trial. The inscription on the slab reads: “Thou shalt not kill.” During the National Socialist dictatorship the ruling powers wanted to take down the slab and destroy it. But some citizens of Bremen stopped them. Instead, the commandment against killing was merely covered with a stone slab and not uncovered again until after 1945. The admonition can still be seen today at the Bremen Regional Court. This episode from Bremen's judicial history brings to light three things. First, “Thou shalt not kill” – one of the ten Biblical commandments – is the archetype for all rules associated with human coexistence. Second, the commandment did not suit the agenda of the National Socialists, who perfected the killing of human beings in their extermination camps with industrial means. Third, the people sensed intuitively that rejecting the commandment against killing was a fatal error that would lead to barbarism. That is why they made sure the commandment stayed where it was, even though it became invisible during the Nazi dictatorship.

German history of the twentieth century offers a rich resource of precedent for property restitution and compensation programs. The Federal Republic of Germany instituted different mass claims proceedings shaped to “reverse” or mitigate violations of property rights that took place as part of (a) the persecutions by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, (b) the Land Reform (Bodenreform) during the Soviet occupation of East German territories from 1945 to 1949, and (c) the nationalization activities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1990. Except for cases under the Land Reform in the Soviet zone, restitution preceded compensation as the main means of redress. All reparation schemes involved specific compensation arrangements including elaborate property evaluation systems.

The European legal system governing data protection issues is widely regarded as an adequate blueprint for late developers to follow. According to this position, host countries will benefit from receiving the ready-made data protection law because it has already gone through a process of trial and error in Europe. For example, China follows the traditional civil law measures on data protection, such as contractual and tort liability. No Chinese legislation deals specifically with the right to protection of personal data. In China, researchers paid attention to the European legal system, which is regarded as the milestone for data protection. Some vigorously suggest that China should quickly move to enact data protection law based on the model provided by European law.

When Chinese researchers strongly promote the European legal system over data protection issues, they send an underlying message that the quality of European laws is good enough to sufficiently deter violations: Individuals would be prohibited from carrying out harmful actions as soon as the expected law is transplanted to China. From a Chinese perspective, our country could quickly move to enact a similar law following the tone of Europe in order to enhance the efficiency of data protection. But is this a compelling position? Will European data protection laws indeed regulate unambiguously and prospectively? Will European data protection laws provide clear guidance to Chinese judges for resolving data protection-related cases? And will the court-enforced laws sufficiently solve the broad spectrum of problems on data use? Understanding the European enforcement mechanism covering data protection issues, and thereby assessing its efficacy on deterrence, is vital to answering these questions.

The application of constitutionally granted communication-related rights assumes the existence of public space as a basic requirement for human encounters. Mass media, such as television, internet, radio, or journals, does not completely satisfy people's general communicative needs. Instead, people need actual places where they have the opportunity to confront other individuals face to face with their opinion. Indeed, some forms of communication require a more spacious area than is owned by individuals, or can only fulfill their purpose at specific locations. Protest marches or rallies, for example, are important in raising public awareness and encouraging a broader exchange of opinions with a wider circle of recipients. Public space is the site to exchange ideas and opinions and thus the location for individuals to confront the public with political disputes, societal conflicts, and other matters. Traditionally, market places, pedestrian areas, public streets, and squares offered such sites. They are not only seen as places for consumption and means of transportation, but also as places of communication and human encounters. Hence, in this capacity, public space is the prerequisite for the actualization of the freedom of assembly and general communication-related rights, which on their part—and thereby also the existence of public forums—are the foundations of democratic decision-making and can be seen as a constituting element of a free democratic basic order.

Secrecy profoundly challenges democratic oversight. Law enforcement cooperation, however, requires some space for discretion and confidentiality. This classical paradox within the context of the European Union is central in the current legislative debate on Europol's revision. The reform is initiated by the Commission's proposal in March 2013 and, for the first time in its history, the European Parliament has direct power to decide over the future of the intelligence agency.

This article argues that we should not overestimate European Parliament's post-Lisbon prerogative for oversight, and particularly its access to Europol Classified Information, due to the architecture of intelligence exchange. The foundational principle of intelligence cooperation confers absolute discretion to the originators of information and Europol's “secrets” in almost all cases originate from the member states or third parties.

The article offers a new legal and empirical perspective on the tensions of secrecy and oversight in the EU, and especially in the Area of Freedom Security and Justice. It discusses the internal information structure of Europol and suggests options for more plausible oversight arrangements.

The European financial crisis has called many of the assumptions of the constitutional structure of the European Union (EU) into question. The market-based model of the European Monetary Union (EMU) led to an improper assessment of the borrowing capacity of the euro-area Member States and a mispricing of their default risk. Another design flaw of the EMU that has been exposed by the crisis was the weakness of the existing framework for economic policy coordination. The factual interdependence of the participating economies in the monetary union was so strong that the denial of some form of assistance to the debt-distressed countries triggered a domino effect in the Eurozone as a whole. The quest for instruments to address the sovereign debt crisis brought a European constitutional crisis to the forefront: the EU did not possess the appropriate mechanisms to help the states in need and to guarantee financial stability in the EMU.

My paper has two parts. In the first part I will outline an evolutionary model for analyzing the relation of democracy, cosmopolitanism and conflict. In the second part I will apply it to the case of European constitutionalization, and its failure.

This essay aims to expand the definitional contours of the “lost generation” discussed in this special section of the German Law Journal. A reflection on the existential loss experienced by many young Europeans must also acknowledge, for the record and for reasons of relative salience, those who have literally drowned in the waters of southern Europe in their quest for a better future. Their youth has been lost in a true—not just metaphorical or metaphysical—sense. The per-day death toll reached its peak on 3 October 2013, when over three hundred bodies were retrieved off the coast of Lampedusa by Maltese and Italian rescue forces. The just-concluded summer brought another tragic surge in Mediterranean migration, including more deadly shipwrecks.

For the last fifteen years I have taught final year law students at a Spanish state university on a regular basis. While it is extremely difficult to generalize about matters such as the following, I believe that the typical profile of the different groups of students I have taught over the years has been relatively homogenous in terms of quality and performance. Along with a minority of highly motivated and able students, at the beginning of every academic year the classes are mostly made up of silent students who are a priori reluctant to accept individual responsibilities in the learning process. Having presented this seemingly harsh appraisal with no preamble, one of the aims of this essay is to set out a series of arguments that enable us to go beyond the glib self-righteousness of blaming the students for all their woes. In my opinion, it is the Spanish higher education system that is the mainly to blame for many of the factors currently holding law students back. The following factors contribute to this outcome.