In July 1999, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began an official crackdown against the qigong cultivation group known as Falun Gong. Intended to quickly contain and eliminate what the PRC considers an evil or heretical cult (xiejiao), the suppression has instead created the longest sustained and, since the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989, most widely known human rights protest conducted in the PRC. The Falun Gong has received worldwide recognition and support while the crackdown continues to provoke harsh criticism against the PRC as new allegations of human rights violations arise.

Fragrant Harbor is the literal translation of the Chinese (pinyin Xiang Gang) for Hong Kong. Once a British colony and now a Special Administrative Region within the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong is also a global financial center. In June 2006 I had the privilege of conducting legal research as a visiting scholar at the Universities Service Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research topic was the influence of Hong Kong banking law on banking reform in the People's Republic of China. The following is a brief summary of my research and experience there.

I.1. A choice: the use of comparative methodology to describe one's own national legal system.

Accessing legal information is a primary requirement for a variety of communities: ordinary citizens, scholars, and professionals. The dissemination of legal information contributes to the rule of law and to the overall ideals of democracy in a number of ways. Many are the benefits of accessing legal information, such as the awareness of the applicable rule of law, the creation of conditions necessary to the equality and fairness of a legal system, while improving the functioning of democratic institutions, the development and improvement of social and economic conditions.

The “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project aims at establishing standards for Italian legislation and tools to promote their adoption. In this paper an overview of these standards, including their latest version features, as well as a description of the tools developed by ITTIG-CNR for their implementation are presented.

The Open Access (OA) movement in Italy enjoys the active participation of single universities, research centres and supercomputing consortia. An overview of OA initiatives in Italy is followed by a more detailed presentation of PLEIADI-Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives, the Italian national platform to provide central access to digital content deposited in Italian Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi). The presentation will conclude with some considerations of the future prospects of OA in Italy.

The need for a more consistent and coherent European contract law is a current priority of the EC institutions. Despite decades of pointillistic legal harmonization, cross border transactions within the Internal market of the European Union continue to take place in the shadow of divergent procedural and substantive law rules, differing legal cultures and significant linguistic diversities. Whilst national contract law systems function more or less efficiently internally, it is their partial non-compatibility with other Member States’ private laws that provokes isolated distortions on the market. As a consequence, the European Commission has presented its ‘Common Frame of Reference’ research strategy aimed at fostering common contract law principles, model rules and uniform legal terminology, which, it is believed, will better facilitate commercial actors. The European Parliament has moved a step further by lending institutional credibility to the case for a European civil code. However, this clamour for codification of private laws – an idea premised on two formalisms, legal and economic – has in many respects overlooked the mechanics of modern commercial contracting in particular, the importance of contract drafting and the complex negotiations that lead to deals both domestically and cross border. This paper therefore provides an alternative assessment of the development of a European ius commune, or ‘common law’ of contract, and considers the urgency of improved means of legal information exchange in order to better facilitate the ongoing harmonization effort.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal (247-182) achieved a most extraordinary feat: he crossed both the Pyrenees Mountains and the Alps with an army of about 38.000 soldiers, 8.000 Cavalry and 37 elephants, aiming to win the Second Punic War by a bold invasion of Italy before the Romans were prepared. Even if his attempts to defeat the Roman legions failed in the end, common lore stills tells the story of the elephants crossing the Col du Mont Genevre in deep snow, setting thus an example of a near impossible achievement for generations to come.