The Editors-in-Chief have decided that we will provide our much-cherished readers with an editorial every so often as a way of sharing insights from the “machine room” where so much of the thinking and work is done to publish the German Law Journal. We want to let you in on the ideas that are on our minds, share with you our observations, and include you in the conversations we are having that might be of interest to you. We begin this tradition with this issue, Volume 21 – Number 6. Andrew Hyde, a member of the editorial team with which the Journal has partnered at Cambridge University Press, as well as Russell A. Miller and Emanuel V. Towfigh, two of the Journal’s co-Editors-in-Chief, open our From the Headquarters Essay with a piece on the Journal’s experiences with and its further plans for making open-access (OA) publishing economically viable. Related to that theme, we also want to share news with you about the introduction of a voluntary article processing charge this fall. Finally, we want to draw your attention to a videos and podcasts service we will start to produce to accompany the scholarship published in the Journal as a way of promoting our authors’ work and expanding access to their ideas. If you are interested only in these latter initiatives, you can also read the short section in the GLJ Instructions for Authors.

Negotiated agreements in criminal proceedings have often been regarded as the embodiment of a negative wider trend towards the informalization of the criminal procedure, and have—especially in Germany—long been the subject of vivid controversies. A criminal proceeding in the traditional sense aims to establish the truth ex officio, which is achieved by means of a comprehensive inquiry into the facts conducted by the court during the trial, followed by a sentence that appropriately reflects the individual guilt of the defendant, which can then, in turn, achieve the procedural objective of “justice.” A streamlining of the extensive inquiry into the facts that the court would normally have to conduct via the consensual process of negotiation does not, a priori, fit the mold of a criminal procedure in the aforementioned sense. At the same time, the consensual termination of criminal proceedings—which also includes other forms of termination of the proceeding besides the concept of Verständigung, which occur by means of a preferment of public charges—is, in fact, more prevalent in practice these days than judgments rendered in adversarial trials are. Our Article focuses on the reasons why this stark contrast between legal doctrine and reality came to pass and which aspects of the implementation of the concept of consensus into the German law of criminal procedure still seem problematic.

Cybersecurity in the financial sector is a dynamic and evolving policy field with unique challenges and specific characteristics. While it has recently received a lot of attention from disciplines like Economics and Politics, legal literature on this topic, especially with regard to EU law, still lags behind. This is surprising, given that cybersecurity in the EU is characterized by complex governance structures, a variety of legal sources, and a wide range of different rule makers and involved actors, and given that only a clear legal framework with efficient institutions at both EU and Member State level can provide for a safe digital environment. The purpose of this Article, therefore, is twofold: On the one hand, it aims to introduce the legal aspects of cybersecurity in the financial sector while taking stock of existing cybersecurity schemes, including their strengths and weaknesses from a legal perspective. On the other hand, it will set out key elements that cybersecurity regulation in the financial sector must respect in order to be effective and come up with reform proposals to make the EU financial sector more cybersecure.

The Common European Asylum System constitutes one of the principal areas in which the fundamental rights of individuals are essentially placed in competition with the core principle of mutual confidence and the need to preserve the effectiveness of EU law. That competitive relationship becomes particularly evident when applicants for international protection rely on alleged violations of their fundamental rights in order to contest their transfer to the Member State that is normally responsible for examining their asylum request according to the criteria of the Dublin III Regulation. The balancing process that needs to be carried out in this respect and the measure of the monitoring obligation that EU law imposes on the receiving Member State regarding the protection of the fundamental rights of asylum seekers are well exemplified by the preliminary ruling in Jawo. That case provides additional clarification regarding the circumstances in which the protection of fundamental rights may introduce exceptions to the principle of mutual trust. At the same time, it illustrates the inherent tensions that exist between the protection of fundamental rights and the application of the principle of mutual confidence.

Large-scale investments in farmland can generate adverse effects on food security, minority groups, and the environment. Consequently, this Article analyzes to what extent international investment law has the potential to prevent those effects, considering the current investment treaty reform towards a symmetrical mechanism promoting sustainable development. First this Article presents the current substantive standard on expropriation of large-scale investments in farmland and the regulatory space left for host states. This Article then frames a potential public interest clause that would have the effect of granting due protection to investors and the right to regulate to host states, while not undermining the public interest and also preventing the adverse effects of these investments.

Multiple laws and regulations in Western Europe have been enacted on the premise that headscarves and face veils constitute an existential threat to the constitutional identity of the respective legal systems. Thus, the logic of militant democracy as a justification for restricting fundamental rights have been applied in order to restrict the freedom to manifest one’s religion. Yet, the politicymakers claiming to defend the constitutional identity through militant democracy have not been able to prove the existence of a concrete, imminent threat against the state from the women who wear headscarves or face veils. Nonetheless, the European judiciaries have taken the political claim at face value and allowed the restrictions without compelling the political decision-makers to provide substantive justifications. Thus, the cases of headscarves and face veils offer a prism, through which we can study fundamental paradoxes of liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

General questions of name of the state are rarely discussed in the literature of public law, political science or legal theory, its terminology is neglected, and in its current state, it is a source of many misunderstandings. Pointed out these terminological problems this study proposes a theoretical framework for the naming system of states which takes into accounts the public law components of names. Among these components the significance of four factors are emphasized: the form of state (form of government), the structure, or organization of state, the role of seemingly neutral terms (for example, the words “commonwealth” or “state”), and, on the contrary, the role of politically, religiously or ethnically bound terms (such as “democratic”, “people’s”, “Arab” or “Islamic”) in the names of states. After clarifying the difference between the terms country name and state name (state title), this study shows that there are cases when the state name (state title) function as country name, and when the country name fulfills the communicative function of the state title.

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has pushed the tension of protecting personal data in a transnational context to an apex. Using a real case where the personal data of an international traveler was illegally released by Chinese media, this Article identifies three trends that have emerged at each stage of conflict-of-laws analysis for lex causae: (1) The EU, the US, and China characterize the right to personal data differently; (2) the spread-out unilateral applicable law approach comes from the fact that all three jurisdictions either consider the law for personal data protection as a mandatory law or adopt connecting factors leading to the law of the forum; and (3) the EU and China strongly advocate deAmericanization of substantive data protection laws. The trends and their dynamics provide valuable implications for developing the choice of laws for transnational personal data. First, this finding informs parties that jurisdiction is a predominant issue in data breach cases because courts and regulators would apply the law of the forum. Second, currently, there is no international treaty or model law on choice-of-law issues for transnational personal data. International harmonization efforts will be a long and difficult journey considering how the trends demonstrate not only the states’ irreconcilable interests but also how states may consider these interests as their fundamental values that they do not want to trade off. Therefore, for states and international organizations, a feasible priority is to achieve regional coordination or interoperation among states with similar values on personal data protection.