It is not a new insight that nowadays everything and everybody seems to be globalized. This is even true with respect to the different branches of the state. We know a lot about the globalization of the executive branch and administrative law (towards a global or international administrative law) for example. Public agencies around the world are compelled to cooperate – e.g. to change information and work together on legal cases – because many problems can only be solved by a cross-border approach. The legislative branch faces the deep influence of globalization, too. National lawmakers have to respect or transform standards and rules set by international organizations such as the WTO, NAFTA or the EU. In the EU, for example, 70–80% of national legislation in the field of economic law is based on rules set by the EU. Furthermore, the question arises whether the judiciary is also remarkably influenced by globalization. Is the judicial branch, or more precisely in the international context, the national and international judiciary, yet globalized? What role does the judge play in the context of globalization?

In an era in which democracy seems to have been relegated to a secondary place by processes associated with economic and political globalization, David Schneiderman's Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise is an unusual book. Globalization, we have been told, comes accompanied by “a sense of newness, heterogeneity, and fluidity,” but Scheiderman's reminds us that all this emphasis on mobility and constant transformations “draws attention away from a transnational regime concerned with fixity and security.” This fixity not only compromises democracy's tendency towards openness and change, but restricts the state's economic functions and limits its redistributive capacity; in short, it reproduces an ideology according to which democracy is not to be trusted in economic matters. In this context, Schneiderman's proposal to “institutionalize a limited set of constitutional rules that do not impede the possibility of living up to democracy's promise, that of innovation through self-government for the purposes of collective betterment,” appears like a truly democratic call of arms.

Half a century ago, the main purpose of university legal education in India was not the teaching of law as a branch of learning and as a science but simply to impart to students a knowledge of the black letter law, that is, certain principles and provisions of law to enable them to enter the legal practice exclusively for local needs. Gradually this perception changed and the process of reform in law and legal education was initiated. The real break came in 1990s when the new challenges posed by scientific and technological revolution and greater interaction between nations, trade in goods and services, information technology and free capital flow across international boundaries made the world a global village. Consequently, the concept of “local practice” widened to that of “transnational practice” in the context of globalisation and opening up of most of the economies of the world.

More than a year has passed since the European Commission introduced the European Private Company (Societas Privata Europaea, SPE) in June 2008. What has become of the draft statute? This paper is meant to give a short overview of its basic features, the other European institutions' discussions and statements, the problems that prevented the proposal from being adopted so far and possible solutions that were introduced.

Values define an important link between law and culture. Giving consideration to the title of the German Law Journal's Tenth Anniversary Symposium, “The Transnationalization of Legal Cultures,” I will address how European law has affected the transnationalization of values.

The process which is commonly called “globalization” in social sciences seems to shatter the very foundations of law and legal thinking. Yet while legal scholarship, for the most part, is still grappling with identifying the problem, Karl-Heinz Ladeur is already offering a solution. He may therefore count among the avant-garde in the debate on law and globalization.

On 18 December 2008, the European Parliament accepted the proposals of the European Commission for amendment of the toy directive. The modifications are published in the Official Journal of the European Communities. Following publication of the new directive, the member states have 18 months in which to transpose it into national law. In Germany, in all probability, this will occur in the 2nd Ordinance to the German Geräte- und Produktsicherheitsgesetz (GPSG - Equipment and Product Safety Act). The revised laws will apply two years after the directive has come into force, while the new threshold values for heavy metals will apply in four years. Until then, the old rules will continue to apply. Thus the directive, which is over 20 years old, has been revised following increasing reports of unsafe toys, particularly, though not exclusively, from China. The aim of the amendment is to ensure that toys do not pose any health risks or risks of injury, thus achieving a reduction in the number of toy-related accidents.

This article examines the evolution of legal education as it has moved through international, transnational, and now global paradigms. It explores these paradigms by reference to practice, pedagogy, and research. Internationalization saw the world as an archipelago of jurisdictions, with a small number of lawyers involved in mediating disputes between jurisdictions or determining which jurisdiction applied; transnationalization saw the world as a patchwork, with greater need for familiarity across jurisdictions and hence a growth in exchanges and collaborations; globalization is now seeing the world as a web in more ways than one, with lawyers needing to be comfortable in multiple jurisdictions.

Criminal law is different, it is often said, from other areas of law in that it is rooted in and thus depends on national heritage to a great extent. This uniqueness is recognized by European institutions, as expressed by General Advocat Mazák in a case concerning the protection of the environment by means of criminal law:

“In many respects, criminal law stands out from other areas of law. Availing itself of the most severe and most dissuasive tool of social control – punishments – it delineates the outer limits of acceptable behaviour and in that way protects the values held dearest by the community at large. As an expression essentially of the common will, criminal penalties reflect particular social disapproval and are in that respect of a qualitatively different nature as compared with other punishments such as administrative sanctions.

Legal proceedings against Siemens AG arising from allegations of bribery were concluded on 15 December 2008 in Munich, Germany, as well as in Washington, DC. The Siemens case has been the largest of its kind. It has changed the compliance landscape and has brought criminal law out of its dark corner and to the attention of the corporate community. Board directors and other managers have painfully become aware that noncompliance with criminal law may not only threaten the existence of a company, but also may lead directly to personal criminal liability. The subject of compliance has also raised the attention of legal advisors and accountants that naturally must recommend the “best standard,” especially if the sensitive subject of corruption is concerned. Last but not least, prosecutors now have a deeper inside knowledge of corruption structures than ever before. Thus, compliance standards tend to rise expeditiously even without regulators taking any action. Siemens thereby smartly has lifted compliance to the “cornerstone” of its business and generally - in particular when it comes to anti-corruption programs -presents its improved and expanded compliance organization as a leading example.

On July 2 and 3, 2009, both old and new friends of the German Law Journal (GLJ) gathered in Berlin for a symposium in celebration of the Journal's tenth anniversary. The two-day symposium, hosted in partnership with the Budesministerium der Justiz (the Federal Ministry of Justice) and the Law Faculty of the Freie Universität, brought together renowned justices, scholars and practitioners as well as law students from North America and Europe to discuss the transnationalization of legal cultures.

Legal education is changing. What is changing is our understanding of “education”, of how we learn and how we should teach. Also changing is our understanding of how to define what is “legal” about “legal education”. Most will nowadays agree that legal education should be more than a vocational training for the practice of the profession in a particular jurisdiction. In analyzing the development of legal education in recent years, we can distinguish two trajectories. Firstly, there is the ongoing attempt of specifically the North American legal academy to make legal studies a transdisciplinary endeavour, a development closely connected to the major “paradigm shifts” in legal theory in the 20th century. Secondly, it seems that jurisdictional boundaries have lost significance in an internationalized, globalized and post-regulatory environment. This calls into question the very notion of “law” itself, at least as traditionally understood as a system of posited norms within a given jurisdiction. How should both developments be reconciled?

As is well known, comparative law enters the curriculum normally only after some substantive law has been learned. The traditional approach first takes the law student's national legal system, with the comparison or foreign law element only coming later as a form of supplement to the standard curriculum. This paper offers some thoughts concerning the teaching and learning of law in a world in which pluralistic and/or transnational elements are commonplace. These plural features stem from the declining authority of the nation state as well as from the strengthening of various forms of sub-national law being in tension with the central system of the state. These developments also include growth of supranational or transnational legal regimes (e.g. EU). The growth of the significance of human rights, especially the considerable growth of the system of the European Convention on Human Rights, has caused national and international legal spheres to overlap. This paper is based on a belief according to which future legal education ought to respond more seriously to the globalisation of law. However, the argument here is preliminary and it offers merely a sketch of essential features with scarce details i.e. this paper is of a somewhat rough design. The theme itself, i.e. transnational law and its effects, is most certainly somewhat fashionable these days.

The Association of Transnational Law Schools [ATLAS] is a consortium of seven law schools from four continents that launched an annual academic summer program, called the Agora, for doctoral students this past July 2008. As the name of the consortium would suggest, the program focused on transnational law. The Agora is one of several multi-school initiatives aimed at furthering the study of the globalizing legal environment. The Agora both reflects and furthers a trend in legal scholarship, and as a consequence legal education, toward a focus on a set of interrelated concerns, which include globalization, international governance, transnational law, comparative legal studies, legal transplantation and the apparent conceptual challenges that these pose. In important respects these new conceptual challenges have a long pedigree in questions about the scope of legal pedagogy and theory. The pedagogical controversy is rooted in questions about the purpose of legal education, namely, whether it is trade training and should focus on practical legal skills, or whether it should be conceived of as broader than this. Intimately connected to this pedagogical controversy is a legal-theoretical controversy about the scope of legal theory (and thus the nature of law and its investigation). Does the word “law” designate the organizational instruments of state power, or should we think of “law” as referring to a more diverse set of social-organizational systems that may have greater or less affinity and connection with state law?

During the Fall of 2007, as part of a much broader York-Nigerian Universities linkage project that he had been working on for some time, Professor Okafor taught an internationalized version of a pre-existing existing course entitled “Human Rights in Africa.” At the same time, Professor Dakas of the Faculty of Law, University of Jos, Nigeria (assisted by Mr. J.D. Gamaliel) taught a similarly modified version of an existing course at their own institution. Professor Dakas, a former Hauser Global Scholar at New York University and most recently the attorney-general of the Plateau State of Nigeria) was the lead faculty at that partner law school in Nigeria.

Starting with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the establishment of the European Economic Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 with only 6 member states, Europe has since become a political and economic union of 27 Member States that has wide law-making competences and thus considerably affects daily life in Europe. With the overall aim of creating a common market for economic activities, borders are largely disappearing and people are free to travel to other Member States and stay, study or work.