“When a stone is put in your way, you can view it either as an obstacle – or as a stepping stone.” This well-known phrase was quoted in one of the opening speeches at the Joint Conference of the Protestant Academy Loccum and the African Law Association in Rehburg-Loccum, Germany, on 30 November 2007. It set the tone for a three-day conference on African law which explored the “Administration of Justice in Africa – Effectiveness, Acceptance and Assistance” in many facets, focusing on different countries and various approaches ranging from women's rights to development cooperation. The African Law Association (Gesellschaft für afrikanisches Recht e.V.), founded in 1973, aims at promoting and furthering the knowledge of the African legal systems. In keeping with the African Law Association's focus on different aspects of law in Africa – not only legal aspects, but also points of view from politics, history, development cooperation and ethnology – the conference participants came from various backgrounds: professors and lecturers from Germany and various African states were present as well as other members of the African Law Association and undergraduate and PhD students from several universities. A large student group, of which the author was a member, came from the University of Würzburg, their interest in African law awakened by a series of lectures in their home university and a cooperation project of the Faculty of Law of the University of Würzburg, the Namibian Ministry of Justice and the Legal Assistance Centre in Windhoek, Namibia.

As Justice Miller's famous lament suggests, wishful thinkers have sought since the beginning to find a way of making the United States Supreme Court ultimate censor of the reasonableness of all governmental action. Justice Chase thought he had discovered the magic wand in natural law, Justice Bradley in the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Justice Goldberg in the Ninth Amendment. Miller battled bravely, but he had lent significant support to the enemy with his freewheeling opinion in Loan Association v. Topeka. The fire was kept flickering in dissent and in majority opinions upholding laws against due process and equal protection challenges only because they were reasonable. It burst into full flame in Lochner v. New York in 1905, and for the next quarter century the Supreme Court was indeed what Justice Miller had denied it should be: ultimate censor of the reasonableness of all governmental action.

Some time ago, one could read in the news about Mr. Abdelghani Mzoudi, the friend of the terror pilots of 9/11. He was acquitted of the accusation of aiding and abetting murder but he was not paid the owed compensation for wrongful imprisonment because his name was entered on a sanctions list of the UN. Many readers will have wondered how this could happen. Few if any will have guessed that we are in the middle of a case of international institutional law here, a process with actors on several levels (including a sanctions committee on the UN level), with different procedures and jurisdictions which can affect payments to an accused even after his acquittal. It is precisely this UN sanctions committee and its actions which form the subject of this paper.

This contribution aims to apply some insights from evolutionary theory to transnational commercial law and to the harmonisation of private law in the European Union. By doing so, it hopes to provide a fresh perspective to the theoretical underpinning of the development of both transnational commercial law and European private law. For transnational commercial law, it has already been well explained that the transformation of the role of the State led to new forms of governance. If there was previously a State monopoly on providing legal certainty and enforcement mechanisms, today the goods of legal certainty and enforcement are often provided by others rather than the State institutions, in particular in cross-border transactions. In European private law, an organic development – in which the role of the national States is also rather limited – is the most likely way to create a successful unified law. Both developments raise many questions. This contribution only aims at providing a framework to deal with one of these questions: how to explain (or even predict) the evolution of law beyond the State (of which transnational commercial law and European private law are important examples)? If legal development can no longer be explained by positivist or natural law thinking, can evolutionary theory fill the gap?

This article analyses the legal, political and moral basis of citizenship in the contemporary world. India is analyzed here as a case in point of a general category of ‘changing societies’ emerging from colonial or communist rule. Citizenship, which used to be considered a part of the general problem of nation-building, has increasingly acquired the character of a salient problem in its own right. This change in perspective has come about as a consequence of globalization and the world-wide diffusion of basic norms of human rights. In the contemporary context, with regard to the problems of endangered minorities whose lives, dignity and welfare are at risk – be it in Kashmir or Kosovo – the world at large considers itself morally bound to intervene, if not militarily, then at least in terms of the invocation of law and good conduct. As such, from the point of view of the post-colonial state, both its national sovereignty and legitimacy are contingent on its success with turning its whole population into citizens. This, the article argues, is contingent on the ability of the post-colonial state to gear its laws, courts and administration towards effective management of identity and the constitutional incorporation of core social values (see Figure 2 below). With regard to ‘making citizens out of subjects’, the Indian ‘experiment’ holds important lessons for other states, ensconced in multi-cultural societies.

It can take a lifetime from the recognition of a legal problem until it is finally solved. Seventy-nine years after Walter Grau focused attention on gaps in the security of transactions of Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH – private limited company) shares, the GmbH reform intends to solve the problem. Until this reform, a prospective buyer of a GmbH share ran the risk that the person transferring the share was, in fact, not the true shareholder and, thus, had no power to assign the share. While the former law did not provide for a bona fide acquisition, the new § 16 (3) of the Gesetz betreffend die Gesellschaften mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbHG – Private Limited Companies Act) protects the true shareholder while also taking into account the buyer's reliance upon the transferor, considering him or her to be the shareholder. This little revolution results in a new kind of good faith acquisition that mixes different elements of “traditional” bona fide rules and adds new details.

It is an irony of our times. The 9/11 attacks catapulted international humanitarian law (IHL) – otherwise known as the “laws of war” or the “law of armed conflict” – into popular conversation as never before. Who ever heard of Common Article 3 before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan? Can anyone recall arguing about the criteria for prisoner of war status before the Taliban and al Qaeda? Was anyone parsing the difference between civilian trials, courts martial and military commissions before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

The analogy, perhaps a bit strained, was made by Advocate General Jarabo Colomer, in his final attempt to trace as sharp as possible the boundary between the European arrest warrant, which is mainly a judicial tool aimed at granting legal assistance in criminal matters among Member States, and extradition, an intergovernmental procedure having a political goal, as provided in a number of international and European conventions, with the latter being adopted under article K 3 of the Maastricht Treaty, and which were all replaced as of 1 January 2004, by framework decision 2002/584/JHA (the Justice and Home Affairs Council) relating, specifically, to the European arrest warrant (the “Framework Decision”).

Faced with the reluctance of states to transfer sovereign powers to the international level, traditional international organizations often resort to voluntary instruments when attempting to respond to pressing issues of public concern such as sustainable development. One salient example is the attempt of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to improve the dire state of global fisheries resources by means of the nonbinding Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF). After years of extensive and dynamic development of fishing capacities in response to an increasing demand from a growing world population, the worldwide production of fisheries seems to have now reached its ceiling. The FAO estimates that three quarters of fish stocks are either fully exploited (50 percent) or overexploited and depleted (25 percent). Any solution to this state of affairs faces complex regulatory challenges. The regulation of collective goods, in this case including the global common space of the high seas, goes beyond mere coordination problems as analyzed by other case studies in this volume. It requires cooperation across jurisdictional zones by a multitude of different actors with various economic and social interests in a subject area marked by fierce economic competition. Free riding must be prevented through monitoring and enforcement at sea. Further, it is now understood that long-term sustainable use largely depends on the protection of the living and non-living environment of the resource, from which derives the need for an ecosystem approach. Uncertainty over reproduction levels and impact of environmental degradation makes a precautionary approach to fisheries management indispensable for successful regulation. The complexity and high level of uncertainty additionally calls for a highly flexible and adaptable regulation.

One of the cornerstones of the law of armed conflicts, known under the term of “international humanitarian law”, is the so-called “Geneva Law”. Bearing in mind the experiences of the Second World War, Geneva Law was an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) initiative to focus codification on the protection of the individual from the ravages of war. Today it mainly consists of the four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the two Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977. However, since the end of the 1970s, further development of the codified body of international humanitarian law has slowed, not least because the international community, given the number of armed conflicts taking place, has become reluctant to accept further obligations.

In the last week of February 2008, the University Assistants of Public Law from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came together in Heidelberg for their annual conference to discuss “Security, Freedom and (the) Public(ity).” A better date for the meeting could not have been chosen; on the day the conference started, the German Constitutional Court declared online searches by German intelligence agencies to be unconstitutional and came up with a new dimension of human rights protection for the privacy of computer network systems. This pathbreaking jurisprudence was omnipresent at the conference; it had already been in the opening-speech by Justice Brun-Otto Bryde (Gießen), a member of the First Senate of the Constitutional Court, which was to render its decision the very next day. It was brought up in numerous discussions during the conference and it was the main topic on the panel discussion with Paul Kirchhof (Heidelberg), a former Justice in the same Senate who was known as the “Professor from Heidelberg” during Angela Merkel's 2006 election campaign, and Fredrik Roggan, a Berlin lawyer and chairman of the civil rights association “Humanistische Union,” who argued the case before the Court. Perhaps it was all a coincidence, but questions of freedom and security have remained on the everyday agenda, in a political context as well as constitutional debates, ever since September 11, 2001.

Since the German Federal Constitutional Court's 1994 decision on the deployment of AWACS surveillance aircraft over the Adriatic Sea, it is one of the cornerstones of German constitutional law that Parliament (the Bundestag) needs to consent to the external use of German Armed Forces in situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is likely. However, the Bundestag may neither determine “the modalities, the dimension and the duration of the operations, nor the necessary coordination within and with the organs of international organizations.” As the requirement of constitutive parliamentary approval is not directly set out in the German Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court (in the following: FCC or the Court) derived it from the general constitutional framework. The concept of “parliamentary army”, designed by the Court, attempts to strike a balance between executive effectiveness and parliamentary participation.

The various contributions to this theme issue are likely to have at least two (non-trivial) things in common. First, they aim to contribute to a research project on “Legal certainty for globalized exchange processes” and to the latter's attempts to explain the observed transformation “towards the transnationalization of commercial law, which is understood as a combination of the internationalization and privatization of the responsibility of the state for the production of the normative good of legal certainty for global commerce”. Secondly, they aim to fulfill this task by making use of “evolutionary theory” or, as it was again expressed in the original conference announcement, by dealing with “a theoretical perspective that gives some substance to the meaning of the term “evolution” with regard to law, social organization, and the state”. Since, as I will try to explain shortly, my own particular take on this – it would appear – relatively small set of commonalities involves more specifically the use of contemporary evolutionary approaches to human behavior. I must admit to having been surprised that no one else seemed to have much use for these approaches in their respective takes on the problems that united us in the conference from which this contribution stems. After all, what better use to make of a theory originating from biology than to elucidate the biological underpinnings of our behavior and its underlying psychological mechanisms as they relate to law and legally relevant phenomena? Perhaps some of the reasons for these at first sight, striking differences in opinion on which “evolutionary theory” to make use of, or what meaning to impinge upon the term “evolution” will become clearer in the pages that follow, offering ways in which eventually to combine them. Or perhaps the two things we had in common when we started out will be all there is left to look at in the end.

Following the 24 November 2003 decision of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH - Federal Court of Justice) the legal framework for upstream loans granted by companies in the legal form of a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH - Private Limited Company), i.e., loans by the GmbH to its direct and indirect shareholders or to an affiliate of such shareholder, has remained uncertain. The ruling of the BGH led to a broad spectrum of interpretations by legal scholars and practitioners – some even predicted the end of cash pooling arrangements for German corporations – which made it difficult for managers of a GmbH to continue existing cash pooling arrangements without changes to their original scope and conditions.