This Article introduces the German Law Journal’s Special Issue on “Solidarity in Diversity? State Responses to Religious Diversity in Liberal and Non-Liberal Perspectives”. The major countries in comparative focus are Germany and Singapore, both self-avowedly secular countries that face the challenge of religious diversity: Singapore, from inception, and Germany, through more recent developments. A key issue the Article raises concerns liberal approaches towards regulating religion; it argues that the liberal model, taking Germany as an example, may serve as a productive starting point for comparative analysis, as the liberal focus on individual religious freedom impacts managing religious diversity, shapes national cultural identity, models of secularism and social solidarity. This is compared with non-liberal approaches, as exemplified in Singapore practice, where a more communitarian outlook underpin more interventionist approaches whereby public interests and the common good tend to be prioritized over individual freedom. The comparative angles offered in this Special Issue is furthermore buttressed in several articles in this Special Issue that make comparisons to other jurisdictions-United States and Canada. This introductory Article offers a brief overview to the various contributions to this Special Issue and identifies unifying themes.

This Article illustrates the functional and conceptual variances of law in different contexts. Whereas legal actors on the international level might normatively aim for law to have a similar effect to that of domestic law, the way in which international and supranational law can fulfill these potential functions is different. Accordingly, this Article argues that an awareness of the particularities and challenges that the potential functions of law encounter in the international and supranational context is needed. Moreover, it suggests an analytical lens to conceptually frame and locate current developments, offering a broader perspective on—or even an element of explication for—the apparent crisis that law is currently facing on the international and supranational scale. After describing the potential functions of law on an abstract scale and grouping them into analytical categories, the Article uses these categories as a lens in order to assess in which way international law can fulfill these potential functions, where priorities regarding certain functions might differ, and where some aspects of these functions are challenged when law is made and applied in the international and supranational sphere.

In an age of profound democratic anxiety, significant academic attention has been paid to the crisis in constitutional democracy. Constitutional lawyers, however, are still grappling with the relationship between public law and the current actual and perceived threats facing constitutional democracy in countries worldwide. This Introduction considers how the articles in this special volume address three pressing questions. How should we should define the current threats to democracy, and populist challenge? Second, how might public law be a potential cause or contributing factor? Third, how might public law still provide some answers to the contemporary challenges to constitutional democracy? In Prof Dixon’s view, constitutional democracy is a good worth preserving and there are models of at least relative “success” in the current constitutional universe. But Prof Dixon shares the view of many contributors to the special volume that the challenge is immense, and urgent, and that there are no easy solutions.

This Article introduces our Special Issue by posing a central question: What is the added value of the increasing prominence of the concept of the “essence” of fundamental rights in EU law? It will address this larger question in four steps: First, by examining the function of the concept in EU law and the methods for its derivation; second, by summarizing how its application diverges across EU—and international—law; third, by outlining some enduring difficulties with the essence concept; and finally, by reflecting on its future role in EU law, including its impact on other sites of legal authority—such as domestic fundamental rights, the political institutions of the EU, and international human rights law. As the other articles of this issue demonstrate, while there is not yet a coherent approach to deriving and understanding the essence of rights across the fundamental rights the EU must protects, the essence concept plays an increasingly significant role in demarcating the boundaries between the EU’s legal and political orders and between overlapping sites of legal authority. Recent developments—such as the rule of law “crises”—are likely to further amplify the importance of “essence” to EU law practice and scholarship.

The intense engagement of populists with constitutionalism—a phenomenon originally related to experiences in Latin America—is increasingly evident in some of the new European Union member states. But the populist phenomenon is clearly not confined to more recently established democracies. Populist constitutionalism stands for a number of distinctive tendencies in constitutional politics and practices which frequently are in tension with—and may even threaten—fundamental values, human rights, representative democracy, and the rule of law. The relation between populism and constitutionalism is, however, not necessarily one of anti-thesis, but rather manifests itself in distinctive ways, depending on specific contexts and variations. In this special issue, we argue that populist constitutionalism is best analyzed in a comparative, and historically and contextually attuned manner. The special issue wants to contribute to understandings of populist constitutionalism, which are both theoretically more robust and able to comparatively reflect on a diversity of “really existing” cases. The various contributions discuss central dimensions to the populist phenomenon. These pertain in particular to: (a) The varieties of populist engagement with constitutionalism; (b) a deeper understanding of the populist mindset; (c) the position-taking and reaction of constitutional scholars to populism; (d) the complex relation and overlap of populism with illiberalism and authoritarianism; and (e) the central nature of constituent power in populist projects.

This Article revisits the role and function of constitutional identity and common constitutional traditions and claims that the latter have had an increasingly stronger influence on the process of European integration—more than may appear at first sight. In addition, the relevance of common constitutional traditions has not been undermined but, on the contrary, strengthened by the emergence of fundamental rights in EU law and the subsequent conferral of binding force on the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Constitutional identity and common constitutional traditions are part of two discourses—security and fundamental rights—which are an expression of the security of the European project as an overarching frame characterizing the EU as a polity and legal system. After an overview of some of the most important rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, this Article concludes by emphasizing the importance of the recent conciliatory attitude recently adopted by the Court of Justice, although the more ambivalent attitude of the Italian Constitutional Court indicates how conflictual features are becoming increasingly important and can no longer be concealed as the EU reaches a more advanced stage of integration.

Declining populations of marine mammals have led to growing concern about their conservation. As a result, a series of specific conservation measures have been put in place (bans on hunting and trading, establishment of protected marine areas). Such rules, although restoring the populations of some species of marine mammals, have nevertheless failed to protect them from the most challenging threat to their survival: the bycatch of non-target species. Accordingly, this Article highlights gaps within fisheries law, clarifying the efficacy of existing norms on the protection of the most endangered marine species of marine mammals, with a particular focus on cetaceans, from over-exploitation.

To this aim, the Article explores the peculiar norms developed by treaties of global and regional scope and the European Union (EU) with reference to specific species, including whales, seals, small cetaceans—referred to as direct protection. The Article then proceeds to an analysis of fisheries law that addresses, in an incidental manner, marine mammal protection—referred to as indirect protection.

The Article is based on the assumption that measures simply banning hunting or fishing, as envisaged by wildlife law, must necessarily be complemented by fisheries law—that is, Inter-regime linkages. Paradoxically, indirect protection can have a major impact in terms of improvement of both fish welfare and conservation; the problem lies in the fact that current fisheries law fails to provide an adequate response to bycatch. This Article proposes methods to improve fisheries law and also discusses whether the emerging concept of fish welfare can be an asset if included in fisheries rules; the Article ultimately contends that welfare issues must necessarily be part of future legal developments.

Scholars in search of quality standards for traditional legal scholarship could well end up disappointed. By answering the question concerning what standards legal academics use for evaluating such works—through reviewing the international literature on evaluative standards and interviews with forty law professors—this Article aims at filling this gap. This Article recommends that traditional legal scholarship is judged by using the following criteria: (1) the conceptual design—a clearly formulated research question that is both original and significant and the adequacy of the methods proposed to answer that question; (2) the composition of a particular line of reasoning—does the researcher adhere to principles of accountability, accuracy, balance, and credibility?; and (3) the overall characteristics of a work of scholarship—the readability and persuasiveness of the whole and the extent to which the researcher managed to identify and clarify the presuppositions that may have potentially affected her inquiry.

Democracy is usually relied upon as an important argument against the excessive influence of international and foreign law on the domestic legal order, and especially on domestic constitutional law. Both in Germany and the United States, skeptics and opponents of the Europeanization or internationalization of domestic constitutional law repeatedly raise democratic concerns. From a comparative perspective, this Article examines the German and American democratic arguments against an overreliance on international and foreign law in constitutional interpretations. In exploring the democratic concerns expressed in German and American discussions, this Article focuses especially on the contrast between German dualism on the one hand and American exceptionalism on the other hand. This Article shows that, while the German dualists and the American exceptionalists base their arguments on different understandings of democracy, they share the viewpoint that democracy can only be realized on the national level, whereas international law aims at uniformity und thus inevitably runs counter to democratic self-governance and self-determination of the states. Precisely in this sense, it can be said that there is no qualitative, but rather only a quantitative distinction between German and American democratic arguments. Thus conceived, the alleged contrast between the principle of open statehood emphasized by German constitutional law scholars and the Constitutional Court and the idea of American exceptionalism embraced by a number of critics of the use of foreign law lies only in the extent to which the reference to international or foreign law in interpreting the domestic Constitution is deemed legitimate and justifiable.

The paper deals with the relationship of different types of populism with authoritarianism and constitutionalism. In the first part, I try to define various approaches—Left and Right-Wing, “good” or “bad”—to populism, especially from the point of view of whether they aim at changing the liberal democratic constitutional system to an authoritarian one. The following part discusses the rhetoric of authoritarian populists, which makes this type of populism distinct from non-populist authoritarians. The paper also explores the question of whom to blame for the success of authoritarian populisms, and the final part investigates, whether the use of legal tools by an authoritarian populist to dismantle liberal constitutional democracies means that we can speak about a special populist constitutionalism. While the paper tries to find out the joint characteristics of authoritarian populism, it heavily relies on the Hungarian experiences as a kind of model approach in East-Central Europe and maybe even beyond.

Scholars today discuss international law from various methodological angles. This Article aims to add perspectives from cognitive science, namely cognitive sociology and cognitive linguistics, or, to be more precise, cognitive pragmatics. It briefly elaborates on these fields’ respective approaches, benefits, and limits. To clearly delineate the usefulness of the methodologies, this Article separately applies both approaches to the same example of a process of interpretation in international law. This Article concludes that the two cognitive approaches can help lawyers better understand and implement international law. This not only provides a description of the process of interpretation, but will hopefully enable a better practice of international law.

The year 2000 marked the birth of EU anti-discrimination law as a field in its own right, with the adoption of two major Equality Directives. They extended the prohibition of discrimination with five additional grounds and expanded the material scope of equality regulation. Having reached its eighteenth birthday in the year 2018, EU anti-discrimination law can now celebrate its adulthood and deserves a bird’s eye exploration of its achievements, failures, and prospects. The present Article provides this exploration by zooming in on these twin Directives, as well as on the “new” grounds of discrimination planted therein, namely race and ethnicity—the grounds introduced by the Race Equality Directive—religion, sexual orientation, age, and disability—the grounds introduced by Framework Equality Directive—and the related jurisprudence of European courts. It first outlines the genesis and main stages in the development of EU anti-discrimination law, followed by a discussion of major normative and practical themes emerging in EU anti-discrimination law after 2000, such as the personal and material scope of the Directives, new forms of discrimination, mechanisms to counteract discrimination, and the proceduralization of EU anti-discrimination law.

This Article focuses on the extent to which the different legal approaches of Germany and Singapore to religious diversity were shaped by history. It first analyzes the development in Germany and describes four phases of the development of the law on the relationship between church and state. Starting with the consequences of reformation, it shows that—for centuries—the relationship between denominations had been the crucial matter of this body of law. Only later, the law dealt with conflicts between religion and atheism. This Article then presents the fundamental rights approach of the Basic Law and examines it against the backdrop of the historical development and recent challenges. Second, this Article offers a historical account of Singapore’s attempts at regulating and managing religious diversity. It starts with the establishment of a British trading post on the island in 1819 and runs up to the present day. As a result of mass migration in its early years, Singapore was to become, in the twentieth century, one of the most religiously and culturally diverse nations in the world. This Article shows that Singapore has sought to regulate and manage the various religious groups through a combination of legislation and state policy.

The concept of the essence of a fundamental right—set out in Article 52(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the “Charter”)—operates as a constant reminder that our core values as Europeans are absolute. In other words, they are not up for balancing. As the seminal judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (the “CJEU”) in Schrems shows, where a measure imposes a limitation on the exercise of a fundamental right that is so intense and so comprehensive that it calls into question that right as such, that measure is incompatible with the Charter, as it deprives the right at issue of its essence. This is so without the need for a balancing exercise of competing interests, because a measure that compromises the very essence of a fundamental right is automatically disproportionate. Therefore, the present contribution supports the contention that in order for the concept of essence to function in a constitutionally meaningful way, both EU and national courts should apply the “respect-for-the-essence test” before undertaking a proportionality assessment.

In this Article, I have analyzed the philosophical grounds on which stands the conception of law implied in legal transplants. On the one hand, behind the idea of legal transplants lurks the misleading assumption that two different legal cultures share common epistemological accounts of what is meant by law; on the other, the idea that a certain legal institution verbally framed may be exported to another culture and touch off similar interpretations and conceptual performances reflects, at its core, a conception of language based on an isomorphic correspondence between legal words and the meanings those words are to stand for. My goal has been to critically expose the philosophical backdrop that lies behind the conception of law implied in the idea of a legal transplant with an eye to the cultural perspective. To this end, I have availed myself of different but convergent perspectives gathered from Wittgenstein’s pragmatic philosophy of language, Geertz’s cultural anthropology, Eco’s semiology, Harris’ integrational epistemology, and Rosen’s cultural theory of law, as a methodological strategy to spotlight different facets of the problem in three dimensions: Language, knowledge, and law.

Populism is a particular type of constitutional pathology; a brand of groupthink in which a leader establishes a direct connection with the people and, by virtue of this connection, is able to govern outside the established constitutional processes of the state. This Article reflects on the interaction between populism and political parties. It argues that one of the roles of political parties is to act as a medium between political elites and the people; a medium that can, or should, enable the people to exercise control over this elite through their membership of parties. Populism therefore presents a threat to the proper operation of political parties, and the proper operation of political parties correspondingly threatens populism.

This Article begins by reflecting on the nature of populism. It does not pretend to provide a complete account of that phenomenon, but rather aspires to identify one strand of populist rule: A particular type of connection between the leader and her people. Second, the paper reflects on the constitutional role of political parties. Whilst political parties have often been treated critically in British constitutional scholarship, it will be argued that they are essential to the success of the democratic process: Modern representative democracy cannot function in their absence. Finally, these two sections of the paper will be drawn together: One explanation for the rise of populism is the weakness of political parties, and one way of combating, or mitigating, populism is for the state, and the citizenry, to support and facilitate parties. This Article suggests a correlation between the decline of political parties and the rise of populism, but it cautiously avoids making claims of causation. It could be that the decline of political parties leads to the rise of populism, as voters who are faced with a choice of superannuated parties turn, instead, to charismatic individuals. Or it could be that the rise of populism leads to the decline of political parties, as voters develop a direct relationship with leaders and, as a result, cease to engage with each other within the context of parties. Or, perhaps, these interactions might occur together, forming a feedback loop, with the decline of parties leading to the rise of populism which, in turn, hastens party decay.

Five years after the Dublin transfers of asylum seekers to Greece were halted—due to recurrent failings in the detention conditions, living conditions, and asylum procedure—the European Commission recommended a resumption of the practice. This Article analyzes the Recommendation in light of the human rights reports preceding and following it. The examination reveals that the renewal of systematic transfers would be premature, posing serious risks to the rights of asylum seekers under European and EU law. The restoration of a flawed system for distribution of asylum claims among the Member States—without fundamental reforms towards greater solidarity—may lead to a repetition of past mistakes. Despite the paramount importance of the Dublin system for the functioning of the Schengen Area, rule enforcement should not supersede human rights protection.

Article 52(1) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights lays down respect for the essence of right as one of the requirements that limitations on rights must respect. This provision is not innovative, as it formalizes into EU law the distinction between “core” and “periphery” of rights present in many national constitutions and in the ECJ and ECtHR case law. Nonetheless, the express reference to essence has given unprecedented resonance to that concept. Essence as the “limit of limits” has a Janus-like character. On the one hand, it pronounces that every fundamental right bears a minimum content which is ringfenced from interference by public and private actors. On the other hand, it stresses the malleability of rights and their social function. The core/periphery dichotomy reflects a balancing act moored in European legal tradition whose symbolism outperforms its utility as a judicial tool. This Article examines the essence clause of the Charter in light of the ECJ case law and the constitutional traditions of the Member States and assesses its role in the framework of fundamental rights protection in EU law. The Article first attempts a classification of rights limitations clauses in national constitutions, following which it discusses the interpretation of essence by the Spanish and the Italian Constitutional Courts. The Article then engages with a theoretical discussion of the concept of essence and examines the case law of the ECJ. Lastly, it looks at the limitations of the concept as a rights protection instrument in EU law.

Liberal constitutionalism is under attack from a new breed of autocrats broadly classified as populist. These populists understand the weaknesses of constitutional liberalism and attack their opponents with criticisms that take advantage of internal weaknesses of the theory. But a closer analysis of theoretical framework used by populists to substitute for constitutional liberalism reveals that they are not really committed to populism in any serious sense. Instead, they have abandoned liberalism in the quest for raw power. Focusing on Viktor Orbán of Hungary and his chief ideologist András Lánczi, this article shows how their public critique of liberalism has attempted to wrong-foot their critics and how their recipe for gaining and wielding political power is only populist to the extent that these leaders are determined to (and often succeed in) winning elections. By peeling back the cover of populist ideology to look at the theories of legitimation under which they rule, however, we can see that the new breed of autocrats aims at primarily constitutional deconstruction through the concentration of political power in one leader. This sort of challenge to liberal constitutionalism is easily countered.

Religious harmony is an idea more commonly invoked in Asian countries, many of which are closely associated with non-individualistic or non-liberal approaches to law, ethics, and politics, than in Europe. As a constitutional norm, religious harmony not only directs state action involving the management of religious diversity but also has the potential to legitimate state action. As a result, harmony, including its subspecies of religious harmony, could be and has been criticized for imposing and legitimating an ideology of control over society, particularly over marginalized groups. While this is the case, I argue in this Article that religious harmony can mean many things and can be used in a myriad of ways that go beyond simply as a tool for state control. Religious harmony is not only a legal/constitutional principle, but has also become internalized as a social norm. Its regulating function extends to inter group relations and further grounds group demands on the state, thus imposing state obligations. To draw out the multiple and complex dimensions of religious harmony as a constitutional principle and social norm, I use Singapore, a self-avowed non-liberal communitarian state, as the primary case study in this Article.