In recent years hardly any field of private law has given rise to the amount of debate that was provoked by the non-discrimination legislation adopted at the European level and, subsequently, by various Member States. In particular, the run-up and the adoption of the German Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (German General Equality Law, hereafter “AGG”) were subject to extensive deliberation. Numerous German private lawyers objected to the perceived dilution of freedom of contract that they felt would result from the comprehensive private law protection against discrimination.

At the current stage of its evolution, the European Union (“Union” or “EU”) has reached a juncture where many leaders and scholars believe that greater integration is both desirable and necessary. Presumably, a primary method by which greater solidarity and integration can be achieved within the EU is through the public inclusion of common value-laden concepts – as defined through a dialectical process – present within comprehensive doctrines such as religion. To date, however, an effective and inclusive means for utilizing religion in this manner has yet to be formulated. In response, this article takes two prominent paradigms – Jurgen Habermas' intersubjective discourse theory and John Rawls' liberalism – to approach the problem and draws from them a new solution that, while tied to their theoretical underpinnings, is nonetheless a novel approach to achieving greater integration within the Union. Under this new framework, the process of legislatively defining human rights allows the morality common to European comprehensive doctrines – including official and unofficial religions – to bolster the Union's solidarity, legitimacy, and democracy both procedurally and substantively.

Legal certainty requires a balance between stability and flexibility. Following the hermeneutical footsteps of legal theorists such as Aulis Aarnio and Alexander Peczenik, a distinction can be made between formal and substantive legal certainty; between predictability and acceptability of legal decision-making. Formal legal certainty implies that laws and, in particular, adjudication must be predictable: laws must satisfy requirements of clarity, stability, and intelligibility so that those concerned can with relative accuracy calculate the legal consequences of their actions as well as the outcome of legal proceedings. Substantive legal certainty, then, is related to the rational acceptability of legal decision-making. In this sense, it is not sufficient that laws and adjudication are predictable: they must also be accepted by the legal community in question.

The new Aussenwirtschaftsrecht generates new insecurity with regards to M&A transactions: On the one hand every industry may be affected by a prohibition, whereas certain sectors (telecommunications, energy incl. oil or natural gas, universal postal services, railway nets, banks, pharmaceutical industry or chemicals industry) are presumably of special importance. On the other hand, vendors should preventively ask any potential buyers from abroad but also German based prospects (given the fact that external investors could be one of their main shareholders) for a written declaration that they comply with the new law or that they have received an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung from the BMWi. Additionally, investors from outside the EU or EFTA seeking to purchase of at least 25 percent of a German enterprise should consider an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung at an early stage, ideally in combination with passing on the complete transaction files to the BMWi. Only in this way is a high level of legal and transaction safety possibly achieved. Conversely, investors prepared to risk of prohibtion and considering the intended purchase as unproblematic should desist from an announcement to the BMWi but bear in mind that the BaFin or the Bundeskartellamt could inform the BMWi, thereby triggering an assessment.

Due to the new law, the BMWi will get an improved overview of planned or ongoing M&A transactions in Germany, given that many investors or vendors will apply for an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung as a precaution. But the German state gains this increased level of regulation only through significant administrative efforts.

The relationship between Community law and Private International Law (PIL) did not have an easy start. The original EEC Treaty merely made one reference to PIL. The notable exception was the Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (1968), an international convention concluded on the basis of art. 220 EEC (293 EC). The Rome Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations (1980) did not even have an explicit legal basis. After the adoption of the Rome Convention it remained relatively silent on the Community level. It did not help that due to the status of international convention the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was deprived of any power of interpretation. The problem was resolved in two separate protocols. The protocol on the Brussels Convention entered into force in 1975 and the protocol on the Rome Convention only entered into force in 2004. Whereas there has been a substantial amount of case-law on the Brussels Convention, the ECJ only delivered its first judgment on the Rome Convention in October 2009.

In order to get a better understanding of the current relationship between liberty and security in the European Union (EU), the essay adopts a new approach to counterterrorism matters, namely by availing itself of Administrative Law, and focuses on a specific case study, the European Community's (EC) regulations on freezing the assets of the terrorists as well as those of the people and entities associated with the terror network and blacklisting the identified subjects.

Recently the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) knocked on the European Union's door with its impressive judgment on the Lisbon Treaty, recalling all the weight of the German scholarship tradition steeped in the German dogmatic flavor: the attention to the history of sovereignty and the attempt to catch all the European Union constitutional system's life revealed the systemic approach peculiar to the German dogmatic scholarship.