The future of the Eurozone and the role of the German Constitutional Court. Research Papers in Law, 05/2012

[Introduction.] Necessary reforms towards a deepened and increased European shaped economic, financial and budgetary policy, paraphrased with the term “fiscal union”, could possibly reach constitutional limits. In its EFSF judgment1, the German Constitutional Court, following the Lisbon judgment in which certain government tasks were determined as being part of the “constitutional identity”2, connected the budget right of the parliament via the principle of democracy to the eternity clause of Art. 79 para 3 Basic Law. A transfer of essential parts of the budget right of the German Bundestag, which would be in conflict with the German constitution, is said to exist when the determination of the nature and amount of the tax affecting the citizens is largely regulated on the supranational level and thereby deprived of the Bundestag’s right to disposition. A reform of the Economic and Monetary Union that touches the core of the budget right can, according to the German Federal Court, with regard to Art. 79 (3) of the Basic Law only be realized by way of Art. 146 of the Basic Law, thus with a new constitution given by the people that replaces the Basic Law.

Value-added norms, local litigation, and global enforcement : why the Brussels-philosophy failed in The Hague

In the early Nineties the Hague Conference on International Private Law on initiative of the United States started negotiations on a Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (the "Hague Convention"). In October 1999 the Special Commission on duty presented a preliminary text, which was drafted quite closely to the European Convention on Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (the "Brussels Convention"). The latter was concluded between the then 6 Member States of the EEC in Brussels in 1968 and amended several times on occasion of the entry of new Member States. In 2000, after the Treaty of Amsterdam altered the legal basis for judicial co-operation in civil matters in Europe, it was transformed into an EC Regulation (the "Brussels I Regulation"). The 1999 draft of the Hague Convention was heavily criticized by the USA and other states for its European approach of a double convention, regulating not only the recognition and enforcement of judgments, but at the same time the extent of and the limits to jurisdiction to adjudicate in international cases. During a diplomatic conference in June 2001 a second draft was presented which contained alternative versions of several articles and thus resembled more the existing dissent than a draft convention would. Difficulties to reach a consensus remained, especially with regard to activity based jurisdiction, intellectual property, consumer rights and employee rights. In addition, the appropriateness of the whole draft was questioned in light of the problems posed by the de-territorialization of relevant conduct through the advent of the Internet. In April 2002 it was decided to continue negotiations on an informal level on the basis of a nucleus approach. The core consensus as identified by a working group, however, was not very broad. The experts involved came to the conclusion that the project should be limited to choice of court agreements. In March 2004 a draft was presented which sets out its aims as follows: "The objective of the Convention is to make exclusive choice of court agreements as effective as possible in the context of international business. The hope is that the Convention will do for choice of court agreements what the New York Convention of 1958 has done for arbitration agreements." In April 2004 the Special Commission of the Hague Conference adopted a Draft "Convention on Exclusive Choice of Court Agreements", which according to its Art. 2 No. 1 a) is not applicable to choice of court agreements, to which a natural person acting primarily for personal, family or household purposes (a consumer) is a party". The broader project of a global judgments convention thus seems to be abandoned, or at least to be postponed for an unlimited time period. There are - of course - several reasons why the Hague Judgments project failed. Samuel Baumgartner has described an important one as the "Justizkonflikt" between the United States and Europe or, more specifically Germany. Within the context of the general topic of this conference, that is (international) jurisdiction for human rights, in the remainder of this presentation I shall elaborate on the socio-cultural aspects of the impartiality of judgments and their enforcement on a global scale

Lipschitz Optimisation for Lipschitz Interpolation

Techniques known as Nonlinear Set Membership prediction, Kinky Inference or Lipschitz Interpolation are fast and numerically robust approaches to nonparametric machine learning that have been proposed to be utilised in the context of system identification and learning-based control. They utilise presupposed Lipschitz properties in order to compute inferences over unobserved function values. Unfortunately, most of these approaches rely on exact knowledge about the input space metric as well as about the Lipschitz constant. Furthermore, existing techniques to estimate the Lipschitz constants from the data are not robust to noise or seem to be ad-hoc and typically are decoupled from the ultimate learning and prediction task. To overcome these limitations, we propose an approach for optimising parameters of the presupposed metrics by minimising validation set prediction errors. To avoid poor performance due to local minima, we propose to utilise Lipschitz properties of the optimisation objective to ensure global optimisation success. The resulting approach is a new flexible method for nonparametric black-box learning. We provide experimental evidence of the competitiveness of our approach on artificial as well as on real data

Reflexive transnational law : the privatisation of civil law and the civilisation of private law

The author examines the emergence of a transnational private law in alternative dispute resolution bodies and private norm formulating agencies from a reflexive law perspective. After introducing the concept of reflexive law he applies the idea of law as a communicative system to the ongoing debate on the existence of a New Law Merchant or lex mercatoria. He then discusses some features of international commercial arbitration (e.g. the lack of transparency) which hinder self-reference (autopoiesis) and thus the production of legal certainty in lex mercatoria as an autonomous legal system. He then contrasts these findings with the Domain Name Dispute Resolution System, which as opposed to Lex Mercatoria was rationally planned and highly formally organised by WIPO and ICANN, and which is allowing for self-reference and thus is designed as an autopoietic legal system, albeit with a very limited scope, i.e. the interference of abusive domain name registrations with trademarks (cybersquatting). From the comparison of both examples the author derives some preliminary ideas regarding a theory of reflexive transnational law, suggesting that the established general trend of privatisation of civil law need to be accompanied by a civilisation of private law, i.e. the constitutionalization of transnational private regimes by embedding them into a procedural constitution of freedom

(Conflict) principles of European (consumer) contract law : an update

In April 2003 I commented on the European Commission’s Action Plan on a More Coherent European Contract Law [COM(2003) 68 final] and the Green Paper on the Modernisation of the 1980 Rome Convention [COM(2002) 654 final].1 While the main argument of that paper, i.e. the common neglect of the inherent interrelation between both the further harmonisation of substantive contract law by directives or through an optional European Civil Code on the one hand and the modernisation of conflict rules for consumer contracts in Art. 5 Rome Convention on the other hand, remain pressing issues, and as the German Law Journal continues its efforts in offering timely and critical analysis on consumer law issues,2 there is a variety of recent developments worth noting

Conservative collision prediction and avoidance for stochastic trajectories in continuous time and space

Existing work in multi-agent collision prediction and avoidance typically assumes discrete-time trajectories with Gaussian uncertainty or that are completely deterministic. We propose an approach that allows detection of collisions even between continuous, stochastic trajectories with the only restriction that means and variances can be computed. To this end, we employ probabilistic bounds to derive criterion functions whose negative sign provably is indicative of probable collisions. For criterion functions that are Lipschitz, an algorithm is provided to rapidly find negative values or prove their absence. We propose an iterative policy-search approach that avoids prior discretisations and yields collision-free trajectories with adjustably high certainty. We test our method with both fixed-priority and auction-based protocols for coordinating the iterative planning process. Results are provided in collision-avoidance simulations of feedback controlled plants.Comment: This preprint is an extended version of a conference paper that is to appear in \textit{Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2014)