The next generation of high-power lasers enables repetition of experiments at orders of magnitude higher frequency than what was possible using the prior generation. Facilities requiring human intervention between laser repetitions need to adapt in order to keep pace with the new laser technology. A distributed networked control system can enable laboratory-wide automation and feedback control loops. These higher-repetition-rate experiments will create enormous quantities of data. A consistent approach to managing data can increase data accessibility, reduce repetitive data-software development and mitigate poorly organized metadata. An opportunity arises to share knowledge of improvements to control and data infrastructure currently being undertaken. We compare platforms and approaches to state-of-the-art control systems and data management at high-power laser facilities, and we illustrate these topics with case studies from our community.

This article analyses the World Bank’s environmental and social Safeguards against the backdrop of changing paradigms of global legal order. In January 2017, a new ‘Environmental and Social Framework’ (ESF) entered into force and replaced older ‘Safeguard Policies’ that had incrementally emerged since the 1980s in response to harmful impacts of investment projects financed by the Bank. The Safeguards reform epitomizes the changing structures and geopolitical shifts that shape international law in the twenty-first century and provides a fascinating looking glass on the evolution of global order since the end of the cold war. In this perspective, we see the first generation of Safeguards, introduced since the late 1980s, as an element of incremental legalization in the emerging global governance regime, a regime characterized by unipolar multilateralism and geopolitical dominance of ‘the West’. The 2016 reform not only reflects the increased politicization of global governance by civil society but also the emergence of a more competitive multilateralism, characterized by counter-institutionalization on the part of emerging powers like China. A comparison of the old and new Safeguards thus allows us to analyse different forms of contestation and resulting normative evolution in the key area of global governance of development and finance.

This article examines to what extent and how German administrative law and organisation have been changed by globalization, as well as the increasing reach and depth of global governance. A first chapter analyzes the legal discourse in Germany and finds that international (more than global) administrative law has become a major topic. It points to three different strands in German scholarship and highlights especially the proposal to conceptualize global governance as an exercise of international public authority. In a second step, the article examines three specific fields of law (environment, health and financial services) and analyzes how national administrative and legal structures have been influenced by globalization. In particular, it inquires what instruments of standard setting and forms of implementation have been used. Finally, the article acknowledges that globalization has had a tremendous effect on German administrative law, and describes seven instrumental and substantive modes of the effect of international rules on the German legal order.

Constitutional law is special not only for the salient importance of its substance, but also for its concentrated yet open form and terminology. Hardly surprising, therefore, the issue of how to interpret and analyze constitutional law is a commonly and sometimes hotly debated topic in most constitutional systems.

The administration of the traditional nation-state used to operate as a rather closed system to the outside world. Today, cooperation between the public authorities of different States and between States and international bodies is a common phenomenon. Yet the characteristics and mechanics of such cooperation can hardly be understood using the concepts domestic public law or public international law currently on offer. Conventional concepts, such as federalism, confederalism or State-centered “realism” hardly fathom the complexity of interactions or reflect the changed role of the State, while more recent concepts, such as multi-level systems or networks, seem to encompass only parts of the phenomena at hand. Given this void, we propose to explore the notion of “composite administration” (Verbundverwaltung) and argue that it offers a concept which can combine more coherently the seemingly diverging legal elements of cooperation and hierarchy that distinguish administrative action in what often is called a multi-level administrative system. Even though the concept of composite administration was originally designed and further developed with respect to the largely federal European administrative space, we suggest testing the concept in the wider context of international cooperation. We believe that it offers valuable insights and raises critical questions, even though we do not intend to insinuate any proto-federal prospects of the institutions discussed in this paper.