Online research in philosophy

This paper examines two main aspect of import/export of rules and legal categories as a crucial point in comparative law and politics: 1) that normally the process is not governed by the exporting party but rather by the importing actors, according to local strategies; 2) that the most of legal systems in the world are "hybrids", so that "pure" models (basically English, French and German) are isolated historical cases and as such are substantially unimportant in depicting how law really works in the world legal landscape.

The processes of economic integration induced by globalization have brought about a certain type of legal practice that challenges the core values of legal ethics. Law firms seeking to represent the interests of internationally active corporate clients must embrace and systematically apply concepts of strategic management and planning and install corporate business structures to sustain competition for lucrative clients. These measures bear a high conflict potential with the core values of legal ethics. However, we observe in parallel a global consolidation of these core values through an enhanced cooperation of national professional bodies, the use of international codes, and comparative legal ethics teaching and research. Furthermore, state regulation of the legal profession is concerned with preserving the core values of legal ethics to conserve the lawyer's role in upholding the rule of law. This article defends that legal ethics is adapting to the pressures exerted by "managerial" approaches to legal practice without this altering core values that underlie legal ethics.

In the classical narratives of the story called European integration, national judges are said to have a 'mandate' under European law: they are 'empowered' by EC law or, in the less thrilling versions of the story, they simply become 'Community judges'. Not only are national judges obliged to apply substantive EC law, they are also requested to apply it in the way required by the Court of Justice. How, precisely, national judges are asked to apply EC law in domestic courts has traditionally been portrayed through the case law of the Court of Justice; not much attention has been paid to the reality in national courts. Over the years, the case law of the Court of Justice has created an image of a veritable European judicial Hercules: a judge who reads in many of the official languages of the European Union; who knows not only all the relevant national and European law, which he applies ex officio, but also engages in comparative interpretation of the law; who identifies himself with the European telos which he is applying on the national level; and so on. The structure of this contribution is dialectic. First, it summarises some of the requirements the case law of the Court of Justice imposes upon national judges when applying EC law. Second, a realistic assessment of the judicial capacity in these areas is provided, with (where possible) some examples from the case law of the new Member States. Finally, broader conclusions are drawn concerning the capacities and strategies of national courts in the domestic application of EC law, including some of the inspirations which the European legal order may draw from game theory.

Commercial lawyers working across borders know that globalization has changed commercial law. To think of commercial law as only the law of states is to have an inadequate understanding of the norms governing commercial transactions. Some have argued for a transnational conception of commercial law, but their grounds of justification have been unpersuasive, often grounded on claims about the common content among national legal systems. Legal positivism is a rich literature on the concept of a legal system and the validity conditions for rules in legal systems, but it has not been used to understand legal order outside or beyond the state. This article aims to use legal positivism to conceptualize a transnational commercial law order. Prevailing positivist accounts at least implicitly condition legal order on state sovereignty. The article offers a cosmopolitan conception of legal positivism, in which the state is no longer an enabling condition for law. The cosmopolitan conception provides the means by which to adequately describe a transnational commercial law order. There are limits to the conceptual analysis this article provides, one of which is that it does not purport to evaluate the justice or morality of transnational legal order. But the cosmopolitan conception of legal positivism elucidated in this article stands on its own as a way of understanding a number of transnational legal orders other than commercial law. The attractiveness of the account is that it describes law as a human social practice even when it is not solely the product of the state, so that we do not have to rely on natural law theories to understand legal rules that states do not maintain.

How can legal orders coexist? Contemporary lawyers and philosophers frequently accept that a legal system operates under its own terms and is shaped by its own participants. Any problems posed by the plurality of legal orders in the world are to be dealt with by each legal order separately. So persons that are caught in transnational disputes because they are subject to two or more jurisdictions, have recourse to private international law, which is always part of domestic law, i.e. the law where the case happens to arise. But this analysis does not capture international law. This is, or appears to be, a distinct legal order that is certainly not the law of a distinct nation or a people but aspires to cover the whole of the world and – perhaps surprisingly – does seem to meet many of the ordinary criteria of a legal order. This review essay discusses two recent attempts at accommodating international law, Regulating Jurisdictional Relations Between National and International Courts, by Yuval Shany and A Theory of Interpretation of the European Convention of Human Rights, by George Letsas. In their own ways both books outline a ‘substantive’ theory of international law, which is to be welcomed.

The growing inter-relatedness between EC and EU law with national criminal law can be well illustrated with the example of enforcement of EU law. Criminal law is one of the latest examples of increasing European integration within the perimeters of explicit competences of EU/EC law which additionally is driven ahead by a spill-over of approaches. Necessities of cross-border crime and criminal enforcement make cooperation necessary. The latter takes place to a certain degree on the basis of positive law established on the basis of the Treaties. It also takes place in the context of evolutionary development of what one might refer to as 'administrative networks.' This paper addresses the legal challenges arising from such integration especially for the protection of rights of individuals and effective judicial review. It outlines several potential solutions for a field of law in which as a model for other areas, enforcement takes place in joint procedures with seamless cooperation across various state and European jurisdictions.

One of the theoretical developments associated with the law of the European Union has been the flourishing of legal and constitutional theories that extol the virtues of pluralism. Pluralism in constitutional theory is offered in particular as a novel argument for the denial of unity within a framework of constitutional government. This paper argues that pluralism fails to respect the value of integrity. It also shows that at least one pluralist theory seeks to overcome the incoherence of pluralism by implicitly endorsing monism. The integrity and coherence of European law is best preserved by considering that both the national legal order and the international or European legal orders adopt sophisticated views of their own limits.

Whilst having long been the object of scholarly examination, the relationship between the European legal order and the international legal order has recently attracted renewed attention following the problems caused by the implementation by EU Member States of the measures adopted within the framework of the UN system of collective security. Within that context, two different discourses have permeated through the case-law of the European Courts and the legal scholarship about the articulation of the international legal order and the European legal order. On the one hand, various scholars and judges have endorsed the idea that the European legal order is an autonomous constitutional order resembling a municipal legal order (European constitutionalism). On the other hand, it has been argued that the European legal order is a legal order of international law and is embedded into the international legal order whose fundamental values and principles it must promote and enforce (international constitutionalism). It is the aim of this paper to, firstly, decipher the diverging features underlying these different understandings of the relationship between the European legal order and the international legal order and, secondly, offer a critical appraisal of their limits in the light of the abiding separation between existing legal orders.

This contribution aims to explain how European Criminal Law can be understood as constitutive of European identity. Instead of starting from European identity as a given, it provides a philosophical analysis of the construction of self-identity in relation to criminal law and legal tradition. The argument will be that the self-identity of those that share jurisdiction depends on and nourishes the legal tradition they adhere to and develop, while criminal jurisdiction is of crucial importance in this process of mutual constitution. This analysis will be complemented with a discussion of the integration of the first and the third pillar as aimed for by the Constitutional Treaty (TE), which would bring criminal law under majority rule and European democratic control. Attention will be paid to two ground breaking judgements of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that seem to boil down to the fact that the Court actually manages to achieve some of the objectives of the CT even if this is not in force. This gives rise to a discussion of how the CT (and related judgements of the ECJ) may transform European criminal law in the Union to EU criminal law of the Union, thus producing an identity of the Union next to the identities prevalent in the Union. The contribution concludes with some normative questions about the kind of European identity we should aim to establish, given the fact that such identity will arise with further integration of criminal law into the first pillar.