European private law has been in the making for a number of decades. The main goal has been to serve the needs of the Single Market. Despite a variety of eorts to make national private laws converge, little unity has emerged. Nevertheless, the Single Market has survived and even grown. This talk oers a critical assessment of the EU’s achievements in the development of European private law. It will examine how the ECJ has interpreted the EU Directives in key areas of contract and tort, and ask to what extent the case law of the European court has harmonized the law in these elds. The presentation will also reect on possible alternatives to the Directives, and question the meaning and need...

The main focus of the lecture will be the concept of the best interests of the child, stipulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This concept is considered to be one of the most important and difficult to be applied in practice. In family-related situations, there are many factors that need to be taken into account when assessing what is in the best interests of a particular child. This task with regard to what is called ‘new forms of families’ or ‘alternative families’ is even much more difficult. At the same time this is increasingly becoming an evolving issue in Europe. Apart from that, it is often linked to another complicated and challenging topic – the...

According to traditional company law theories, there are at least ve dierences between a Company and a partnership: (1) a company is a legal person while a partnership (or sole proprietorship) is not, (2) shareholders of a company can enjoy limited liability while partners bear unlimited liability, (3) a company faces double Taxation while a partnership does not pay taxes, (4) a Company has an independent personality and enjoys an independent management power while in a partnership situation, only partners operate the business, (5) a company is mainly regulated by law while partnership is mainly regulated by contract. Based on the recent developments of US Company law and other business laws, this lecture intends to point out that these distinctions...

The principal aim of the International Hague Network of Judges (IHNJ) is to improve the operation of the Hague Child Abduction Convention and the handling of other cross-border civil cases relating to children by promoting international judicial co-operation. By creating direct contact points between members of the judiciary in different States, speedier and more satisfactory resolutions of cross-border disputes involving children, and in particular child abduction cases, will be achieved. The IHNJ also allows for the exchange of information between judges to increase knowledge and improve practice under the 1980 Convention and under other Hague Children’s Conventions, as appropriate. Further to presenting the IHNJ, the Emerging Guidance regarding the development of the IHNJ and the General Principles for Judicial Communications,...

Die Auseinandersetzung um die rituelle, medizinisch nicht indizierte Genitalbeschneidung unmündiger Jungen findet seit dem Urteil des Kölner Landgerichts vom Mai 2012 in ganz Europa statt. Viele Disziplinen sind von dieser Auseinandersetzung betroffen: Die Ethnologie, die Medizin, die Soziologie, die Geschichte, aber natürlich auch die Rechtswissenschaften. Die Diskutanten gehen dieser Thematik im Hinblick auf die Kinderrechte, insbesondere das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit, das elterliche Erziehungsrecht sowie das Grundrecht auf Religionsfreiheit nach.

The main focus of the lecture will be the concept of the best interests of the child, stipulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This concept is considered to be one of the most important and difficult to be applied in practice. In family-related situations, there are many factors that need to be taken into account when assessing what is in the best interests of a particular child. This task with regard to what is called ‘new forms of families’ or ‘alternative families’ is even much more difficult. At the same time this is increasingly becoming an evolving issue in Europe. Apart from that, it is often linked to another complicated and challenging topic – the...

Die neoklassische Theorie basiert auf dem Modell des homo oeconomicus, der eigennützig und rational handelt. Hinzu kommt die stillschweigende Annahme der unbegrenzten Wil-lenskraft, d.h. dass einmal gefällte Entscheidungen auch in die Tat umgesetzt werden. Zahl-reiche empirische Studien haben gezeigt, dass die Annahmen der neoklassischen Theorie in der Realität oft nicht zutreffen. Durch die Verhaltensökonomie wird in erster Linie die Ratio-nalitätsannahme hinterfragt. Daniel Kahneman unterscheidet zwei Denksysteme: einen schnellen, intuitiven Denkmodus (System 1) und einen langsamen, rationalen Denkmodus (System 2). Denkmodus 1 bedient sich kognitiver Faustregeln („heuristics“), die zu kognitiven Verzerrungen („biases“) führen können. Um die Entscheidungen der Individuen zu verbes-sern, schlagen Richard Thaler und Cass R. Sunstein vor, die Entscheidungsarchitektur („choice architecture“) der Individuen so zu gestalten, dass diese in...

In a first part, research trends in legal logic from the viewpoint of legal philosophy and artificial intelligence and law will be outlined. In particular, the following perspectives and challenges will be considered: (a) developing innovative logics and argumentation frameworks for modelling and representing legal interpretation and interpretive canons; (b) devising adequate and comprehensive logical models for understanding and reconstructing norm change mechanisms and legal dynamics; (c) studying the game-theoretic nature of argumentation in the law and identifying what game types can be used in general to model strategic legal dialogues; (d) combining deontic logics with other systems – e.g., action logics, epistemic logics, preference logics – to grasp legal concepts such as trust, responsibility, and influence. In a second...

The past decade has witnessed an amazing acceleration in the development of private international law legislation in China as well as a signicant progress in the quality thereof. In 2010, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted China’s rst statute on private international law (Private International Law Act). The adoption of the Act is a historic event in Chinese legislative history, as it indicates that China has modernised its conflict of law rules after many years of unremitting eorts made by legislators and scholars. Moreover, the Supreme People’s Court of the PRC promulgated an Interpretation (I) of the Private International Law Act in 2013. The Interpretation (I) attempts to provide concrete explanations on the abstract articles mainly in Chapter...

Family law for a long time was only centred on one particular family unit: a man and a woman united in (indissoluble) marriage, and with children. But we now live in a world where marriages often end in divorce; where categories of gender are not as fixed as they used to be and legal men can give birth to children; where children are not necessarily genetically related to their birthparents or indeed may have three genetic parents, and even more social parents. The law has been too slow to react to societal changes and medical advances, and these issues need to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.