After the terrorists' attacks of September 11, 2001, a lot of war rhetoric came out of the public and private sphere within the United States of America. On October 7, 2001, however, the rhetoric turned into reality as President George W. Bush countered the terrorist attacks and the threat of future terrorism with military means. While waging that new war U.S. governmental officials constantly make one important point, and that is that the United States are just exercising their right of self-defense. Moreover, on the day after the attacks, the Security Council of the United Nations unanimously reaffirmed the inherent right of self-defense as recognized by the Charter of the United Nations. Does that mean that international law is just that clear?

As already reported by German Law Journal, the German Government, the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) as well as the Bundesrat (Federal Legislative Chamber of the Länder) filed motions with the Bundesverfassungsgericht (FCC; Federal Constitutional Court) seeking a constitutional ban of the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). Now, some eight, respectively six months, after filing the motions for a constitutional order of the NPD's dissolution, the banning of all of party activities and the confiscation of the party's property, the FCC decided on October 1st, 2001, that the motions were admissible. The following annotation discusses the meaning of the Court's decision to admit the motions, provoding a brief account of what the decision says and what — just as interesting — it does not say. It will also report on the course of events and developments that have taken place during the stretch of time between the filing of the applications and the Court's ruling of October 1. Finally this report will provide, leaving aside speculations as to possible results of the process, a short survey of the legal possibilities that are open to the NPD, once the FCC in Karlsruhe grants the motions and declares the party unconstitutional.

In this presentation I shall start with a brief introduction into the concept of Reflexive Law (Part I), in order to examine what makes especially Reflexive Law a promising candidate for a fruitful contribution to the ongoing debate on the normative-legal or mere social-factual status of Lex Mercatoria (Part II), and finally coming up with the suggestion of some criteria or features, which we should draw special attention on in the process of the emergence of a New Law Merchant as an autonomous legal system (Part III).

A survey on Internet use by employees at their workstations published by Sterling Commerce on 29 August 2000, showed that more than 60% of those employees that have access to the internet surf at least once a day for personal rather than their official business reasons. That means that every employee, on average, is online for about 3.2 hours each week — for personal reasons. This fact — according to the Sterling Report — causes a yearly loss for employers of about 104 Billion Deutsche Marks. In this calculation, costs for the connection to the Internet are not included.

During the last few years the German courts have had to face several cases in which companies — especially from the IT-sector — filed lawsuits against “headhunters.” “Headhunters” in this context are (usually) executive consultants who try to poach personnel from other companies by simply calling them and asking whether or not they want to change companies. Since skilled and qualified workers and employees are desperately but often unsuccessfully searched by innumerable German companies on the domestic and most recently also the European and international job-market, the methods of poaching have reached and sometimes crossed the borders of unfair practices. The courts faced with these cases had to draw these borders, a process this article attempts to outline.