Once a major reform has been concluded, one might easily be tempted to be just glad about what has been achieved and to think that nothing more needs to be done. However, experience in Germany as regards the amendment of criminal law and law of criminal procedure has shown that “after the reform” has, at the same time, always meant “before the reform.” The history of German criminal law is the history of a never-ending reform. The reform has not only consisted in making individual corrections to the existing positive law; time and again, developments in society have posed new challenges to criminal law, which, in the course of time, have resulted in profound changes in its structure. This means that even after a reform has been concluded, there must be willingness to further shape criminal law or, as the case may be, to protect it from changes that might be brought about by new influences. German criminal law, with its more than 130 years of history, and with its almost 180 more or less profound amendments of the law, bears eloquent witness to the profound changes that criminal law can experience, in spite of individual extensive reforms, admittedly in a time of historical upheavals. The present contribution provides an outline of the history of German criminal law through the present time and tries, on the basis of this outline, to develop a forecast of the influence to which criminal law will be exposed in the future.

There are four stages leading up to the creation of a limited liability company (GmbH). The founders agree upon the memorandum and articles (1), appoint a manager (2) and pay in the capital contribution (3). They must then notify the relevant District Court (Registergericht) in order to register the company in the Commercial Register (Handelsregister) (4). This notification must include a confirmation from the manager that the requisite minimum proportion of the proprietor's capital contributions has been paid in and is freely available for his or her use.

This essay deals with the topic of director & officer liability for the dissemination of false information in Germany in the form of ad-hoc disclosures. From the perspective of an American trained attorney, it is surprising to note that there is, to date, very little – quite possibly zero – real personal civil liability in this area for directors & officers of publicly traded companies, however limited criminal sanctions do exist. The essay discusses the lawmaking which is underway in Germany to increase civil liability. After a review of the laws which govern the dissemination of false information, the essay reviews five German cases: Infomatec, EM.TV, Metabox, Comroad and Deutsche Telekom as examples of cases where criminal sanctions for management appear to be much more likely than civil liability.

On 12 December 2002, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared inadmissible an application filed against Greece and Germany by 257 victims and relatives of victims of Nazi war crimes committed in Greece in 1944. This decision was not only the latest of a number of ECHR decisions concerning the judicial treatment of Nazi war crimes committed during the Second World War, but it also marked the second time that the Court had to deal with the question of whether states may rely on sovereign immunity in cases concerning breaches of peremptory and non-derogable jus cogens norms.

The legal term “mental retardation” can be a life-saver since the summer of 2002. The possibility that had been announced in an earlier decision by the U.S. Supreme Court finally came true: The Court decided in a 6–3 vote that the Constitution of the United States bars the execution of mentally retarded offenders. With its “landmark death penalty ruling,” as it was called by the New York Times, the Court saved the life of Mr. Atkins, a man with an I.Q. of 59 who was convicted of committing murder and robbery at the age of 18. Empirical estimates show that this decision could move 200 or more people off death row. Unfortunately, the ruling is too late for at least 44 mentally retarded inmates who have been executed since 1976.

The School of German Law at the Jagellonian University in Cracow was established in 1997 as joint academic undertaking of the Law Faculties of the three Universities Ruprecht Karls- University (Heidelberg, Germany), Johannes Gutenberg-University (Mainz, Germany) and Jagellonian University (Cracow, Poland). The initiators and first directors of the School were Professor Kazimierz Lankosz (Cracow), Professor Horst Konzen (Mainz), and Professor Peter Hommelhoff (Heidelberg). The 5th anniversary of the School in 2002 provides a good opportunity to sum up the activity of the School until now and to ventilate some thoughts on the future plans for this innovative undertaking, which already had proven to have gone well beyond its original boundaries.