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Mediation plays an ever more important role in the resolution of disputes around the world. While attention to mediation continues to grow both within and outside of the Asia-Pacific region, scholarship and research on the impact of mediation on legal systems and legal cultures remains sparse. Before a meaningful comparison of the role that mediation plays in different legal systems can be advanced, some fundamental questions need to be answered.

Although Asian cultures traditionally favour harmony and reconciliation over litigation and adjudication, this broad generalization requires careful analysis of regional diversity and its underlying reasons, as will be demonstrated by the study presented in this lecture. Differences in understanding are likely to be at their greatest when parties from different jurisdictions…

Laws of nation states and laws of logic: The law of every existing legal system is local to time, place, and country. That proposition is central to Legal Positivist legal theories that are so familiar to jurists (professors and students) at this august institution who are so robustly aware of Hans Kelsen’s seminal jurisprudence. That proposition is also acknowledged by any plausible “natural law” theory of law. Logic has been well and powerfully characterized, in the work of great philosophical logicians as diverse and influential as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Gottlob Frege, as the discipline that articulates universal “laws of thought,” local to neither time nor place nor country nor person.

In this presentation I shall describe a method of analysis,…

Gunnar HEINSOHN, Professor emeritus of the University Bremen, is a historian, sociologist and economist, who elaborated — together with Otto STEIGER — a specic theory of modern economics, namely the theory of ownership-based economics.

This theory deals with a symptomatic lacune of mainstream economics — this being the absence of any theoretical explanation of money and interest in mainstream economics — and focuses on legal institutions such as rights in rem (ownership) and contracts (credit agreements) to explain the origins of money and modern business cycles.

The key elements of mainstream economics, such as the pretense of universalism and the assumption of a homo oeconomicus and his self-interest driven rationality, are amongst those building blocks of contemporary economics which are in the…

The system of property rights in the current Russian legal framework as well as in the proposed Draft Amendments to the Civil Code (which will be adopted in 2014) are analyzed from a comparative law perspective.

The lecture will focus on both the conceptual framework of property rights in the Russian legal system as well as on practical issues in regard to judicial protection, acquisition and limitation of ownership and other real rights. In addition, the social and economic implications of the concept of property will be discussed.

In a systematic analysis, property rights according to the Continental European tradition are contrasted with concepts and notions of Common Law. In this context, the problems of eventual legal transplantation are thoroughly assessed. The…

Central-local relationship is an important constitutional issue which every nation, whether big or small, needs to deal with. It is usually prescribed for by the constitution of the nation. The formation of the central-local relationship in a specic nation often has its historical reasons. In nations adopting a federal system, such as the United States of America, Australia and India, local governments, especially state or provincial governments, are the basis for the establishment of federal government, which is the central government. In nations
adopting a unitary system, such as the United Kingdom (“the UK”) and China, the purpose to set up local governments is to administer the state aairs more eciently. In many nations, either federal or unitary, all local…

This lecture by a distinguished practicing attorney and professor of law addresses the issues that arise in the United States when the constitutional right of a free press collides with a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights to a fair trial, to a fair and impartial jury, and to due process of law.

In the American criminal justice system, an accused criminal defendant is innocent until proven guilty at trial. To this end, he enjoys a panoply of unalienable constitutional rights that the courts jealously guard at each stage of the proceedings. Equally, every American school child knows that freedom of the press — the constitutional freedom to publish without let or hindrance — is protected by the courts to the utmost possible…

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (“Abduction Convention”) 1980 came into force in December 1983. A central objective of the conventions concluded under the auspices of the Hague Conference on Private International Law is to harmonize the law governing topics involving international elements. The more widely ratified the Convention, the greater the extent to which this objective appears to be realized. In this respect, the Abduction Convention can perhaps be seen as the most successful of all the Hague Conventions, with 92 Member States (as of April 2014). However, true harmonization also requires uniformity in interpretation and implementation of the Convention .

This lecture will discuss some of the disparities in the way in which the…

There are many conceptions of constitutionalism, and many aspects of it even within particular conceptions. But one important dimension of constitutionalism is the way in which constitutions impose second-order constraints on first-order policy, political, and moral preferences. Policies or decisions that might on the balance of reasons be wise may still be unconstitutional because they are procedurally imperfect or, more importantly, because they violate rights-based side constraints on otherwise advantageous policies. Even welfare- or happiness- or utility-maximizing policies may still be unconstitutional because they infringe on, for example, rights to equality, or rights of freedom of expression or freedom of religion, or the rights of those charged with crimes.

Sometimes constitutions impose such second-order constraints on first-order policies because of a…

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 of…

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 right…