Litigating abroad : merchant’s expectations regarding procedure before foreign courts according to the hanseatic privileges (12th - 16th c.)

Between the 12th and 16th centuries the Hanseatic merchants obtained extremely important privileges from the rulers of the countries with whom they traded. These secured their commercial and legal status and the autonomy of their staples in Flanders, England, Norway, Denmark and Russia. Within these privileges no other subject receives so extensive a treatment as court procedure. Here, the single most important concern of the Hanseatic merchants was their position in front of alien courts. The article analyses the great attention given to court procedure in the twenty main Hanseatic privileges: What did the merchants require? Which procedural rules were necessary to encourage them to submit their disputes to alien public court instead of taking the matter into their own hands and turning to extra-judicial methods to resolve matters, e.g. cancellation of business relations, boycotts or even trade wars? This analysis suggests that the two most important concerns reflected in the procedural rules were to avoid delay to the next trading trip and to ensure a rational law of proof. The former was addressed by pressing for short-term scheduling and swift judgment and by the dispensation from appearing before the court in person. The latter included avoidance of duels and other ordeals and the attempt to obtain parity by appointing half of the jurors from Hanseatic cities

Seehandel und Kaufleute im Alten Europa: Recht ohne Juristen, Gesetze und Staat : die Geschichte des Handelsrechts wieder im Blickfeld der Forscher

Die Welt wird kleiner. Moderner Verkehr und moderne Kommunikation lassen die Kontinente enger zusammenrücken. Die Staaten verlieren mehr und mehr Funktionen an supranationale Organisationen und Konzerne; vielerorts ist gar die Rede vom nahen Ende der Nationalstaaten und ihrer Epoche. In einem großen Teil Europas jedenfalls hat die Einführung des Euro vor einem guten Jahr diesen Souveränitätsverlust, der für Währungen, Zölle und vieles andere längst zuvor vollzogen worden war, auch sinnlich erfahrbar gemacht

Introduction

Peer reviewe

Introduction

Peer reviewe

Landau-Ginzburg String Vacua

We investigate a class of (2,2) supersymmetric string vacua which may be represented as Landau--Ginzburg theories with a quasihomogeneous potential which has an isolated singularity at the origin. There are at least three thousand distinct models in this class. All vacua of this type lead to Euler numbers which lie in the range $-960 \leq \chi \leq 960$. The Euler characteristics do not pair up completely hence the space of Landau--Ginzburg ground states is not mirror symmetric even though it exhibits a high degree of symmetry. We discuss in some detail the relation between Landau--Ginzburg models and Calabi--Yau manifolds and describe a subtlety regarding Landau--Ginzburg potentials with an arbitrary number of fields. We also show that the use of topological identities makes it possible to relate Landau-Ginzburg theories to types of Calabi-Yau manifolds for which the usual Landau-Ginzburg framework does not apply.Comment: 92p