A spectre is haunting contemporary theoretical debates: the spectre of Network. Whether it is about techno-music or football, whether the focus is on the architecture of poststructuralist thinking, international terrorism or individual career-planning, there is one common feature of all debates: the network model. There seems to be hardly a cultural theory – in a wide sense – still able to go on operating without using (at the very least) its heuristic effects. Meanwhile, even the entertainment and the advertising industries have discovered the concept. We need not wonder, then, that it is bull market for the model on the specific juridic field too.

Networks have been discussed extensively in different ways within social and cultural theory as well as in economic scholarship. Author of Network Power, David Singh Grewal, participates in a popular discourse by describing globalization as a series of networks of power in contemporary society. In the same year that his book was published, Grewal writes a response to these theories of a globalized “flat” society in an article for the UK newspaper, The Guardian. Entitled “The World Isn't Flat – It's Networked,” the preface reads: “Globalisation does not 'flatten opportunity in the world: rather it forces everyone to conform to an underlying standard, specifically that of the already privileged nation.” A young scholar, Grewal holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and is currently Ph.D. student at the Department of Government at Harvard University.

In 1944 Raphael Lemkin wrote in his book titled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: “By Genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” Four years later, on 9 December 1948 the term “genocide” coined by Lemkin simply by merging the Greek word “genos” (people) and the Latin word “caedere” (to kill) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in the Genocide Convention. Now, six decades later an international conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Genocide Convention took place from the 4th – 6th December in Marburg and the city of Frankfurt in Hesse/Germany sponsored mainly by the German Foreign Office and the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation. The main purpose was to discuss the implications of the genocide convention from 1948 on an international platform with scholars from different countries and disciplines.

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.

The celebration of 180 years of legal education in Brazil, held in August 2007, was marked by strong criticism of the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (Brazilian Bar Association) and the higher education expansion policy which was undertaken in the late 1990s, establishing more than a thousand law schools in the country. The escolas de enganação (schools of illusion), created mainly during the last decade, would have increased the numbers in the professional college, which currently has around 600,000 lawyers, to approximately two and a half million, if it were not for the professional filter of the Bar Exam. In other words, the proliferation of mass legal courses in Brazil would have enabled the emergence of educational merchants, specializing in the sale of an illusion of social elevation and professional success, which, thanks to the control of entry into the professional corporation, did not happen.

Generations of politicians and lawyers will have to read and re-read the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court of 30 June 2009 regarding the Treaty of Lisbon (“Lisbon Case”) on almost a daily basis for many years to come. The Court, master of its own proceedings and not feeling bound by any doctrine of judicial self-restraint, has expounded in this decision at great length about its own philosophy of the European integration process. Based on its self-established theory, in which every German citizen is holder of a democratic right to a legislature that is endowed with substantial powers to determine the destiny of the German people, the Court examined the Treaty in each and every detail. The claimants, alleging through a constitutional complaint that this democratic right had been breached, could not point to any specific injury that they had suffered. In real terms, their constitutional complaints amounted to an ‘abstract' review of the Treaty, a remedy which the Basic Law reserves for the federal government, any government of a Land, or for a third of the members of the Bundestag. But the Court saw the constitutional complaints, which had been filed by the extreme right and the extreme left of the political spectrum, as a welcome opportunity to define the constitutional limits of the European integration process. Far from reflecting the views of the framers, the ruling reads like a political manifesto from the judges.

I am delighted to be here to celebrate with you the tenth anniversary of the German Law Journal. The mere existence of a publication like the German Law Journal is remarkable, but what is even more impressive is that it is of such a high intellectual quality.

The problem with our memories is that our imagination constantly interferes. Friedrich Dürrenmatt contended that whether something would have been possible is sometimes more important in memory than that which was real, so that past possibility becomes confused with past reality. Put another way, that which was possible gradually encroaches on that which was real, until years later memory accepts the synthesis as fact. Must, then, the designation “non-fiction” for any memoir not be a contradiction in terms? What I was in 1968 is not quite what I wish I had been, and the temptation is strong to impute motivations in retrospect that were not present at the time. The fact that it has been forty years since my experiences and that I have never written them down before, renders any attempt at chronological accuracy futile. Thus, I am grateful to the editors of the German Law Journal for heartily accepting this subjective, rather than an historically objective, report from the ground.

The third essay in Habermas' collection The Divided West is entitled “February 15, or: What Binds Europeans.” The essay regionalizes the global claims Habermas makes in the longer chapter “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” That is, in “February 15” Habermas makes the case for a European post-national order that he hopes will become the vanguard for the emergence of universal cosmopolitanism. Habermas concludes that all that is lacking for the achievement of this beachhead from which Europe can, in its turn, champion a “community of free and equal citizens” in a “global public sphere,” is a “European identity.”

We rarely witness wars between states anymore but this does not mean that there are fewer conflicts or less injustice worldwide. The contrary is true. More people than ever have become a victim of civil wars, other sub-state armed conflicts and genocide during recent years. The international community disagrees about how to react to gross human rights violations that occur in the course of these “new wars”: whereas some think this is a genuine task for the United Nations, others stress the argument of unrestrained national sovereignty as essential condition for international peace. Despite unceasing contestation, foreign interventions are nevertheless increasingly seen as an appropriate response to this kind of armed domestic conflicts – at least under certain conditions. The latest testimony in this direction is the emergence of an intense international debate over the “responsibility to protect”, which seeks to justify military invention in cases of a severe violation of individual negative rights of freedom.

There is no cause for celebration: Instead, the judgement coming out of Karlsruhe must be seen as an expression of the Federal Constitutional Court Justices' fear of subjecting themselves to the European Court of Justice. Indeed, the judgment raises questions about Germany's commitment to Europe.

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.

The number of Mexican institutions of higher education (hereinafter also referred to as “Institutions” or “IHE”) offering Bachelor's Degrees in Law has increased rapidly. For example, in the 1997–1998 academic year, there were 364 Institutions offering the basic law degree; by the 2006–2007 academic year, the number had increased to 930. It is as if, over the last ten years, each week a new IHE began offering a Bachelor's Degree in Law. During that same period, law school enrollment in Mexico increased from 170,210 to approximately 240,000. By 2003, the Bachelor's Degree in Law was the degree program with the highest enrollment in the country – 11 out of 100 students at the college level chose it.

It is proper that we have come to Berlin to celebrate this remarkable transatlantic enterprise. It is true that the German Law Journal was born in Karlsruhe and that it emerged in its current form – as an online, monthly, peer-reviewed, English-language forum for commentary on developments in German, European and International law – at the University of Frankfurt. But one advantage of Internet publishing is the detailed information editors can gather on their readers, including the almost absurd statistic that tracks the frequency with which the German Law Journal website is accessed from each of Germany's Postleitzahl districts. Berlin is the right place for this event because we know from that data that the largest block of our German readers, by far, is based here in the German capital.

It can only seem impolite to speak about network failure in the presence of Karl-Heinz Ladeur, who has been insisting that the law needs to change in order to address the transformation of the organizational society into the network society. Alas, here I stand; I can do no other.

The excessive availability of conventional weapons, small arms and light weapons (SALW) in particular, and the unrestricted trade which make them available raise serious security, humanitarian and social-economic concerns of international nature. These weapons are the major tools of contemporary armed conflicts, abuses of human rights and humanitarian norms, violence, terrorism and criminality. This has led many, including the former United Nations (UN) Chief, Kofi Annan, to believe that these arms are the real weapons of mass destruction of our time, causing half a million deaths annually. This is not to suggest that conventional weapons are not also useful for good causes. They are necessary for maintaining law and order and self-defence purposes. However, their proliferation and unrestricted transfer across borders, especially from the industrialized world to developing (and conflict-torn) countries, have not yet been addressed. In other words, their availability and supply have not been subjected to proper (legal and enforceable) restrictions.