One of the consequences of the method the International Court of Justice employs to draft its pronouncements is that, at times, its reasoning is less candid than one might desire. The Court's advisory opinion on the Legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of 9 July 2004 provides a clear example. To reach unanimity, or near unanimity, on the points decided, one can only assume that the judges bargained hard over the discursive normative component of the Opinion.

The new Council Regulation (EC) No. 1/2003 on the implementation of the rules on competition laid down in Article 81 and 82 of the EC-Treaty, which came into force on 1 May 2004, brings fundamental changes in the application of European competition law. It replaces the Antitrust-Regulation No. 17 which has been in force for more than 40 years. Regulation No. 1/2003 establishes a system of direct applicability of Article 81(3) EC-Treaty, which abandons the requirement of notification as a key element of the old system under Regulation No. 17. Under the new scheme set up by Regulation No. 1/2003 Article 81(3) will be directly applicable. This enables national competition authorities and national courts to apply Article 81 and 82 of the EC-Treaty in their entirety, including paragraph 3 of Article 81. Although the new regulation is to be considered as an important step in strengthening and reinforcing European competition policy, in particular in view of the enlargement of the European Union, the numerous changes involve uncertainties which call for adjustment. The following article gives an overview of the new enforcement system for Articles 81 and 82 of the EC-Treaty, set up by Regulation No. 1/2003.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted in a newspaper article last year as claiming that “[b]y their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans”. The accuracy of this claim has been a topic of considerable debate in Russian literature and politics from the time of Czar Peter the Great at least. The pressing question is whether Russia wants to be part of today's Europe. Mounting evidence from the domestic and foreign policy of the Russian Federation suggests that the answer to this question is ‘nyet'.

My colleagues on this panel address the need for more internationalization in U.S. law schools and describe some of the difficulties in internationalizing instruction at a law school in a new European Union member state. As they acknowledge, internationalizing legal education can be expensive, competing with other budgetary demands on U.S. law schools. My remarks today will suggest methods to maximize internationalization less expensively, by using existing programs or by setting up new ones more effectively. Although composed for an audience of U.S. law school faculty members and administrators, these remarks, with some adaptation, may be useful for law faculty outside the United States.

This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between violence, law, and sovereignty in the context of terrorism today. It focuses, not on normative questions about terrorist violence, but on its structural relationship to law and the sovereign state. Part of the difficulty in theorising terrorism is its heterogeneous and indeterminate nature. For instance, if terrorism is to be characterised by a form of violence designed to inspire fear, then one can of course speak equally about state terrorism as one can about non-state terrorism. Indeed, one might recall that the very word terrorism derives from La Terreur of the post-revolutionary French Republic in the early 1790's. Saint-Just's words stand out as one of the most infamous justifications of state terrorism: “What do you want, you who do not want virtue in order to be happy? What do you want, you who do not want the Terror to be used against the wicked?” That the highest ideals of the Republic were accompanied, and indeed inscribed, through a systematic, yet often indiscriminate, register of violence – that Republican virtue came to be associated with the willingness to be merciless – is more than just a vicissitude of history. It speaks perhaps to the very nature of political discourse itself, unmasking the violence implicit in every political symbolisation, at the base of every law, no matter how democratic.

In 1971, upon the conclusion of my university studies and my first state examination, and before sitting for my second (final) state examination, I commenced my practical training as a so-called Referendar at the Amtsgericht (local district court) in Gettorf, near Kiel. It was a very small court, employing only one judge who was responsible in this position for all legal cases. In addition, a total of approximately 20 other employees were working there. The court had no electric typewriter, and no copying machine. When a copy had to be made, the document was literally transcribed in the true sense of the word. Later, after my second and final state examination, I started my services as a judge at the Landgericht (regional court) in Bremen, a court with approximately 60 judges and a total of approximately 200 employees. It was not a matter of course that each judge had a telephone of his/her own. Moreover, connections to the outside world were frequently only possible through the general telephone exchange. One office had to be shared by several judges. Dictating machines were available, but not taken for granted. On the contrary, as a rule it was the usual practice for a clerk to take the minutes—even in cases for which the Code of Procedure did not specifically require this.

The emerging of an early idea, – the idea of a united Europe in peace replacing the destructive force of nationalism – could not have been a proper blueprint for the formation of a European Society until the brute force of the two World Wars prepared the ground for the awareness of political, economical, and social necessities. The first chapter in the book of the European Union regarding this founding idea was written back in 1951/52 by establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) as a Community based upon law. At first, following Jean Monnet's sectoral approach toward integration in connection with the idea of supranationalism, unifying element should have been the supranational administrative body called “High Authority” (former name of the Commission in the first ESCS-Treaty). Given that the ECSC arose on the basis of law, one of the first and most important questions seemed to be the need of legal protection framing and balancing the power of the nearly almighty High Authority. This need should be satisfied by the establishment of a European Court of Justice (ECJ) as a permanent Court in the ECSC-Treaty. Although the shape of the former European Community has been immensely changed and extended through the years of integrational process, the once established ECJ still remains the judicial core in the institutional structure. But how did the system of legal protection react on the defiances of the integrational process?

[Editors’ Note: This is the fourth consecutive article published in German Law Journal since July 2004 that is dedicated to the ongoing debate over the fate and prospects of the German model of Capitalism, welfare policy and corporate governance. The 22 July 2004 acquittals of all six defendants in the criminal proceedings against former Mannesmann CEO, Klaus Esser; Deutsche Bank's CEO (Vorstandssprecher) and then Member of Mannesmann's supervisory board, Josef Ackermann, and other members of Mannesmann's Supervisory Board have, once more, highlighted to German, European and International observers the particular features of law and politics in “Germany Inc.”, “Rhenish Capitalism”, or “Rhineland Capitalism”. As begun in the aftermath of Josef Ackermann's inthronization at the head of Deutsche Bank in May 2002 (exactly two years and two months before his acquittal before the Landgericht Düsseldorf) and Ackermann's subsequent transformation of the Board's control structure, German Law Journal has published several contributions to the ongoing changes in German corporate governance and its embeddedness within the specific German economic and legal system (see http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=156). In the Journals July issue, Peter Kolla, a law student of Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, meticulously traced the background debates to the closely observed criminal proceedings in the Mannesmann aftermath (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=460), and in our August issue, Jürgen Hoffmann, Professor of Sociology in Hamburg, surveyed the current interdisciplinary debate over the future fate of so-called Rhineland Capitalism and reconstructed Germany's recent history in an international context of globalization and privatisation (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=485). Also in the August issue, Max Rolshoven, writing his Ph.D. in law at the University of Münster, offered a first assessment of the acquittals in the Mannesmann case (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=480). In the article, published here, Professor Christopher Allen of the University of Georgia further deepens this inquiry from an economic point of view, while placing the contemporary debate over the possible end of Rhineland capitalism in the historical context of Germany's development in the 20th Century. The Editors of German Law Journal are very pleased and honored to be able to provide for a further forum for this important debate, bringing together lawyers, economists, political scientists and sociologists, for a much needed exploration of the historical and political origins as well as of the legal framework of Germany's much critizised and, at the same time, ardently praised system of corporate governance and industrial relations. We invite our readers to contribute to this debate, which has so far found too little resonance in Germany itself. The Editors.]

Terrorist acts have, for a long time, constituted a major concern for the international community. Yet the definition of terrorism has represented an area of international law where the divergence of views between States was significant. For some, the protection of the State and of the democratic values of the society laid at the heart of the debate, whereas others were more concerned with the risk of an unjustified repression of “freedom fighters.” These approaches, although apparently complementary, have proved to be irreconcilable in practice. At the United Nations’ level, this division of the international community prevented the emergence of a consensus over a horizontal definition of terrorism. This situation,-paradoxically did not impede the adoption of several international conventions dealing with specific aspects or forms of terrorism as well as of multiple resolutions on this issue.