In 2016, the German parliament changed the law on sexual assault and rape (Sect. 177 StGB). The new law assumes a “no-means-no”-model, while the old law required coercion as a necessary feature of rape and other forms of sexual assaults. In addition, two new offense descriptions were introduced: sexual harassment (Sect. 184i StGB) and offenses out of groups (Sect. 184j StGB). In this Article, I describe the deficiencies of the old law, the process of law reform, and the newly enacted prohibitions.

With increasing cultural and religious diversity in Germany, a debate has emerged over the extent and limits of religious freedom in day-to-day life. While much controversy arose over whether public school teachers have the right to wear Islamic head coverings, students as private individuals are free to wear a headscarf at school if they wish. Yet, recent school and administrative court decisions suggest that the situation is different for students who wear niqab and Islamic face veils rather than just head veils. This Article contemplates whether niqab-wearing students can be expelled from public school under current German law. In addition, this Article addresses the constitutionality of law reform in this area especially considering the European Court of Human Rights' jurisprudence in the French context. The Article subsequently contemplates the advisability of such law reform while also drawing on the experiences of countries which have already enacted so-called burqa bans. As many countries are currently in the process of considering face veil bans, this Article may have relevance beyond the German context.

The CJEU has no jurisdiction to rule in purely internal situations, save for three exceptions. As easy as this may sound, the CJEU's case law is not entirely consistent and created uncertainty for national courts. This article critically examines how the CJEU has dealt with purely internal situations. It shows that the CJEU should be stricter in defending its gates. Instead of turning the three exceptions into the rule, the CJEU should treat the three exceptions as they were originally envisaged: Exceptions. The recent Grand Chamber in Ullens de Schooten is a step in the right direction. A stricter approach makes it necessary that the CJEU looks a bit more over the national judge's shoulder, which changes the cooperative dynamic by putting the CJEU into a more vertical position vis-à-vis national courts. National courts can, however, escape this more conflictual setup by providing more detailed information as to the fulfillment of one of the three exceptions.

The theory of constitutional pluralism as advanced by MacCormick and Walker witnessed immense success in its attempt to explain the relationship between courts of Member States performing constitutional review and the Court of Justice. Despite its success, the theory has often been criticized for its lack of normative prescriptions and legal certainty in resolving the question of the final arbiter in the EU. It is the aim of this Article to address and move beyond these criticisms by introducing and exploring the auto-correct function necessary for the proper and balanced functioning of the pluralist system.

The auto-correct has the function of preventing an outbreak of conflict between the constitutional jurisdictions involved—in the EU judicial architecture, an awareness on the part of all the actors involved of the benefits of a pluralist setting results in conflict management and control. The auto-correct function operates as follows: in the EU as we know it, issues prone to constitutional conflict arise regularly, and both the Court of Justice and national constitutional jurisdictions are able, through their respective procedural avenues, to control the extent of the conflict. There are also two legal imperatives driving this dynamic in two opposite directions—the principle of primacy of Union law on the one hand, and the obligation to respect the national identity of Member States on the other.

As analyzing judicial behaviour shows, the application of self-restraint and mutual accommodation avoids a clash between parallel sovereignty claims on EU and national levels. In particular, national and EU law interaction demonstrates the existence of in-built conditions for the auto-correct function's application, such as the principle of EU-friendly interpretation in national constitutional law, or the national identity clause in primary EU law. The auto-correct function manifests itself and brings about a balance between the different constitutional orders only through the interaction of parallel claims to sovereignty.

This Article examines the desirability of the universal recognition of the right of public access to legal information as a human right and therefore as part of a legal framework for improving national and global access to legal information. It discusses the right of public access to legal information as a legal right and the importance of its international human rights framework. The Article argues that every person has the right of public access to legal information, which casts a legal and moral duty on every government and every intergovernmental organization (IGO) with judicial and legislative functions to provide adequate and free access to its laws and law-related publications. It argues further that every government can afford the provision of adequate public access to its legal information and that the lack of political will to do so is the preeminent factor responsible for inadequate—and in some cases extremely poor—public access. Additionally, this Article advocates the universal recognition of the right of public access to legal information as a human right and makes a proposal for a UN Convention on the Right of Public Access to Legal Information. It provides the essential contents of the proposed UN Convention which incorporate The Hague Conference Guiding Principles to be Considered in Developing a Future Instrument. These contents provide valuable input for urgent interim national and regional laws and policies on public access to legal information, pending the Convention's entry into force. The proposed UN Convention will significantly enhance global access to official legal information that will promote widespread knowledge of the law. It will also facilitate national and transnational legal research and remedy the chronic injustice from liability under inaccessible laws under the doctrine of “ignorance of the law is no excuse”—which is similar to liability under ex post facto and nonexistent laws—and promote the proposed doctrine of “ignorance of inaccessible law is an excuse.”

The invasive but highly profitable snow crab has made its way into the waters of the High Arctic, precipitating a direct confrontation between the EU and Norway over the interpretation of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. Norway claims the Treaty does not apply due to its strict interpretation of the Treaty's terms, which pertain only to the archipelago's terra firm and territorial sea. The EU claims the Treaty's equal access and non-discrimination provisions follow the evolution of the international law of the sea, and make the living (and mineral) resources of Svalbard's surrounding continental shelf and waters open to all states parties to the Treaty. The dispute has gone on for decades, but this Article maintains, through a review of Norway's increasingly isolated legal and political stance that time is out of joint for Norway and its long-term appropriative design and strategy to territorialize this area of the High North.

The history of the “Integration through Law” (ITL) project, conducted by Mauro Cappelletti at the European University Institute in the late 1970s and 1980s, unfolded in this Article, provides clarity on the nature of the power-knowledge nexus in European law, as it pulls the curtain on the close collaboration between academia and the Community institutions in the ITL project. It demonstrates that the ITL was an academic expression of a constitutional vision, which had flourished in the Commission and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for decades, but had never truly been adopted in the emerging academic discipline of European law. Alongside the studies of Eric Stein, the ITL project was the impetus behind the constitutional discourse in academia turning into a paradigm in the 1980s, but the ITL project had an unparalleled impact. Firstly, because of the scholarly environment at the European University Institute (EUI), and secondly, because of the notion of “Integration through Law,” which has proved to be an extremely powerful concept, providing a field of scholars, law professors, civil servants from the Community institutions, and ECJ judges with a flattering self-image and a raison d'être expressed in three little words.

Although over the last thirty years an increasing number of scientific articles and books with diverse approaches have been published on the practice of constitutional adjudication, several methodological problems still prevail. The main deficiency of the systematic empirical research on constitutional adjudication consist in an unsophisticated dichotomous approach that separates the merely positive and negative decisions of constitutional courts, i.e. decisions that concluded in declaring the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of a given legislative act. This approach has been deeply inconsistent with the worldwide practice of constitutional adjudication, since the latter shows a widespread differentiation of judicial decisions over the last thirty years. In this study, we have elaborated a more sophisticated methodology for systematically mapping the manifold reality of constitutional adjudication, and measuring the strength of judicial decisions. In order to fit the research to reality, we have elaborated a scale to measure the strength of judicial decisions. This scale seems to be an appropriate tool to answer the main descriptive research question of our project: to what extent have decisions of constitutional courts constrained the legislative's room for maneuver? The present methodological paper focuses on the problem how to measure the strength of judicial decisions vis-à-vis the legislation and shows, by means of the first results of a pilot project, how this new methodology might be applied.