Most European and American attorneys and judges think the U.S.A. has its legal roots in English common law, and that is probably true for the many areas of U.S. law that are still controlled by the traditional common-law process of simultaneously making and applying law. Yet, with respect to constitutional law – America's greatest legal contribution to modern respect for the rule of law, the roots of the U.S. legal system are firmly planted in Europe, not England. The U.S. Constitution was inspired by French revolutionary ideas of rationalism in law; it was intended as an integrated document just like codes; and it has been interpreted by American judges to be not just a political document but binding law – law that is binding on all three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary. In fact that was the holding in Marbury v. Madison, the case decided exactly two hundred years ago.

This spring, Florence was cluttered with peace flags, hanging out from private apartments, churches, official buildings, and businesses. One day in the middle of March, I counted as many as 50 bandiere de la pace in a single street crossing in the Oltrarno area, south of the river Arno. On 9 June 31 of them were still hanging there. At the time of my first count, it was obvious that the flags all meant “no” to the military action that was to begin in Iraq. What did they mean two months after the fall of Baghdad?

On the same day that the United States Supreme Court handed down its much anticipated decisions on affirmative action in higher education, holding that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution permits a degree of race-consciousness in public university admissions, it also issued a far less heralded decision with implications for the ability of the states to address historical injustice. In American Insurance Association v. Garamendi (Garamendi), five members of the Court, led by Justice Souter, found that California's Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act of 1999 (HVIRA) “interferes with the National Government's conduct of foreign relations” and is therefore preempted.

The January, 27, 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision, FCC v. NextWave was, on the surface, nothing more than the high court's statutory interpretation of a single provision of the Bankruptcy Code. Deep down, however, NextWave tells an important spectrum management and regulatory story which is relevant in both the U.S. and European contexts. It is the story of a company which paid too much for wireless licenses at auction, and a story about a battle – political as well as legal – between government and industry for retention of the license. This same struggle is presently taking place in Europe in the wake of the 3G auctions. This Article reviews the recent NextWave decision and makes propositions about similarities in the European context.

During the process of the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a voluminous set of rules was elaborated to ensure that the Court will become an effective instrument for the enforcement of international law. These rules and provisions were drafted and approved in the abstract, but how would they actually work in practice? – We hear that the USA has undertaken an enormous diplomatic effort to limit the jurisdiction of the ICC. To what extend would the outcome of these efforts create an obstacle for the Court to exercise its jurisdiction? – The new ICC Prosecutor has just been sworn in, and several hundred incidents have been reported to the Court where crimes falling under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court might have been committed. Still, it might take some months, if not years until the Court sees its first indictment or trial and until the statute and rules of the Court are applied for the first time.

I am going to discuss three aspects of globalization that have an impact on human rights. The first is the greater knowledge around the world about what is happening in far away places that has resulted from the advances in communications technology and in the mobility, if not of masses of people, of influential people, including journalists.

As soon as major fighting was over the public discussion focussed on the question who would reconstruct Iraq and repair the damages caused by the hostilities. While the most discussed question concerned the countries or companies actually carrying out the reconstruction, the question of who would finance it played a minor role in the public discussion.

Originally, a number of French and German historians and legal scholars merely planned to meet in Berlin at the Centre Marc Bloch to speak - both in French and in German - about the interdisciplinary challenges that have been emerging with regard to historians working on the history of law or, legal history. Eventually, the dimensions of the envisioned meeting widened as PhD-students and fellows working at the Centre and at other institutions expressed their interest in the topic. Step by step, he initial scope was extended to grow into a full day's workshop on June 24th, 2003, attracting some twenty-five scholars of history, law and the history of art to Berlin's Schiffbauer Damm, where the Centre Marc Bloch is situated. The workshop, organized by Anne-Sophie Beau, Isabelle Deflers, Thomas Horstmann, Guillaume Mouralis and Petra Overath, convened under the title: “History and Law: a mutual approach. Assessing the Dialogue between the History of Law and the Historical Sciences”.

First of all I want to express my deep gratitude for having been given the honour to speak to you today. A lawyer from Germany addressing the 50th birthday celebration of the Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten - that would have been inconceivable back in 1952 when the Dutch Bar was founded. This inconceivable idea has become reality thanks to the rule of law. After all, the rule of law has been the fundament on which the treaties establishing the European Union of today have been based. Incidentally, the first such treaty, the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty dates of the same year 1952. We all, and in particular we foreign lawyers, should pay tribute to Hugo de Groot (Hugo Grotius), this magnificent Dutch lawyer, who centuries ago has laid the theoretical bases therefor.

The European Community's (EC) regulatory framework for electronic communications contains many detailed and complicated regulations with regard to the content of sector-specific regulation in the field of telecommunications. Remarkably, though, it is rather reticent concerning the question which markets shall be subject to sector-specific regulation. In the ongoing process of transposition, this has caused much confusion and misunderstanding. This article therefore, strives to clarify the mechanism for determining which markets are, at least potentially, subject to sector-specific regulation provided by the Framework Directive (sub B.). At the national level, a draft of the German Telecommunications Acthas been presented by legal experts of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour on April 30th, 2003 (Draft German Telecommunications Act), and the subsequent Federal Government's draft act was published on October 15th, 2003 (Revised Draft German Telecommunications Act). These drafts may serve as an example of bringing sector-specific regulation in line with general insights of competition policy within the discretionary scope left by the regulatory framework of the EC (sub C.).

It is the primary task of Law Schools around the world to educate young promising adults who choose the responsible profession of a lawyer, be it in the role of an attorney, a lawyer in administrative services, in industry, or a judge. Apparently, in almost all countries, admission to these important professional roles is highly regulated, be it by law, be it by professional tradition or be it by a mixture of both of these factors. It generally requires a university degree and/or the successful passing of an examination administered by the State or a professional organization. For a law school, which feels any responsibility towards its students, legal education must first of all aim to equip them with the methodological, theoretical and practical knowledge, insights and basic skills necessary to fulfill the requirements for these degrees and exams, hoping at the same time that these requirements are those that enable the former students to properly, conscientiously and ethically perform their important roles in their respective national societies. Accordingly, the law of my home state requires that “the aim of legal education is the enlightened lawyer who thinks critically and acts rationally and is aware of his or her responsibility as a guardian of a free, democratic, social state, governed by the rule of law, and is able to recognize his or her obligation to further develop the law.”

In previous conflicts about domain names within the global address system, German judges only had to answer relatively simply legal questions. Under which conditions does a domain name, which is easily confused with another name, infringe the rights of the name owner? Pervious decisions have identified infringement in the following cases:

- The name and domain name are, to a significant degree, identical or may be easily confused with one another,

- The user of the domain name possesses no personal right to the name, and

- The name usage is likely to promote mistakes about the origin of the web-site.

There are various ways in which globalization can and does promote human rights. I want to focus on one of the ways in which globalization, because of the way it is managed by the most highly developed countries, has a very deleterious impact on human rights. Highly developed countries have managed globalization in a number of ways such that it has increased wealth disparities between the center and the periphery and the effect has been to heighten resentment for the center from the periphery. Unfortunately, that resentment sometimes manifests itself in the rejection of what are seen as Western values, including human rights. In fact, a number of leaders of countries on the periphery find it convenient to manipulate public opinion in order to foster hostility towards the West and in the process, hostility towards efforts to improve their human rights practices.

There is currently a considerable amount of soul-searching underway by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. For the cosmopolitanites of the academic world, the unpleasant disagreements over policy towards Iraq between Old Europe and the New World were not only unsettling but symptomatic of a more deep-seated disagreement between (former) friends. The theme of the Unidem seminar, held at the University of Göttingen on May 23-24, 2003, can be seen as sitting nicely within a desire for an explanation for this tension. Clearly underlying the organization of the conference, choice of themes and the invitation of speakers was the organizer's desire to reach a greater understanding of the difference and similarities between constitutionalism in Europe and in the United States and the reasons for and consequences of these divergences. Thus, although the Iraqi crisis obviously took place long after the theme of the conference had been conceived (and it has to be said that Georg Nolte's conferences appear to have a habit of coming hard on the heels of related dramatic events in the real world, suggesting an almost magical foresight on his part), it should nevertheless be understood as falling within this movement.

On January 15th 1958, the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - FCC) pronounced a judgement deemed to be a prime example for the Court's early jurisprudence concerning the scope of fundamental rights in Germany: The Court's famous “Lüth”-decision resulted from a constitutional complaint brought by Erich Lüth, former member of the Hamburg senate.* In the early 1950s, Lüth had called upon film distributors and the public to boycott Veit Harlan's tearjerker movie Unsterbliche Geliebte (Immortal Beloved). Cause for his appeal was Harlan's prominent role in the Nazi propaganda machinery as Goebbels' protégé and director of the movie Jud Süss in 1940, which counts as one of the worst anti-semitic films released during the Nazi regime. After having lost several civil lawsuits, Lüth asserted the violation of constitutional rights. Over six years later, he was to be proved correct: The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that Lüth's complaint was covered by the right to freedom of speech guaranteed in Art. 5 of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz). The Court stated that the fundamental rights as laid down in the Grundgesetz are not only of importance as subjective rights protecting the individual against state intrusions on the private sphere. As a whole they also unfold an objective dimension in representing society's crucial values. Therefore, they govern the entire legal order - including civil law and private law relations! This was indeed understood as a staggering conclusion with which the Court went far beyond the issue at stake. Since Lüth, German legal discourse characterizes this phenomenon as the third-party or horizontal effect of basic rights (Drittwirkung).