Law

angelegten
Gemeinschaft von Mann und Frau ist fester
Bestandteil der christlichen abendländischen Kultur.
Nach kanonischem Eherecht kann eine Ehe nur durch
den Tod eines der Ehegatten aufgelöst werden. Diese
Vorstellung prägt auch die rechtliche Ausgestaltung
der Ehe in den Rechtsordnungen abendländischer Provenienz.
Vor allem in den katholisch ausgerichteten
Staaten Südeuropas und Lateinamerikas war die staatliche
Ehe lange Zeit regelmäßig als unscheidbar ausgestaltet.
In den stark protestantisch orientierten Staaten
wird die Ehe zumindest als eine Gemeinschaft
verstanden, die auf Lebenszeit ausgerichtet ist. Dementsprechend
wird auch in Deutschland die in Art. 6
GG geschützte Ehe bis heute als grundsätzlich unauflösbar
angesehen.
In den letzten Jahrzehnten haben sich jedoch die Eherechte
der abendländisch geprägten Rechtsordnungen
stark von ihren religiösen Wurzeln emanzipiert.

Family enterprises make up the majority of all businesses across Western Europe. Nonetheless, they are seen as an endangered species. Succession is an especially critical moment for their survival. The succession process is shaped by the dynamics of generational relations in the family. Different institutional contexts between countries create diverse conditions for the negotiation between the generations.

Doing Succession in Europe examines whether and how succession processes in European family businesses vary. Scholars of the family, capitalism, welfare state and law discuss comparative findings and ideas; business and legal experts highlight the concrete practices.

Since the declaration of Helsinki in 1964, data protection in a medical research environment has been a matter of concern. The implementation of a 1995 directive of the European Union (95/46/EC), has created a scattered array of differing national legislations within Europe. Some countries even have different regional laws on data protection, making it even harder for cross-border data transfer for research. Therefore, the EU commission issued in 2012 a proposal for a regulation on the protection of individuals with regards to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. One single European legislative text would do away with fragmentation caused by the diverging implementations of the current Directive in the Member States. It would apply across the EU and leave no room for individual, national regulations in this field. It could be a great opportunity, making it easier for cross-border research projects across Europe: Having a single point of contact, equally binding laws across Europe, clear definitions of consent and whether consent or the use of anonymised data is required, will certainly be very helpful.

However, the proposal has received criticism by the research community as it implies certain changes (Taupitz, MedR (2012)30:423-428).

Researchers claim that amendments are needed to clarify the scope of the Regulation and ensure that the use of pseudonymised data in health research is regulated proportionately (Association of Medical research charities: http://www.amrc.org.uk/news-policy--debate_consultation-responses_external-consultations-by-year#2012, last-opened-on 09Sep2012). For example, the requirement of informed consent is strengthened. Under certain conditions, research can’t be done without the data subject giving explicit, precise consent. For large European research projects, it could cause great obstacles.
We examine the implications of the draft regulation for large research projects with a focus on biomedical research, showing the approach of two current EU projects (www.biomedbridges.eu and www.ehr4cr.eu).

Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research: The EHR4CR Project

Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research (EHR4CR) is one of the most innovative clinical research projects in the world. Launched within the Innovative Medicine Initiative, the largest public-private partnership in Europe, initiated by the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, it is run by a consortium of 35 partners, including 11 university hospitals and 11 pharmaceutical companies together with renowned research institutions and small IT companies from 7 European countries. The objective of the project is to create an exchange platform and business model for using data from electronic health records to test the feasibility of clinical study protocols, recruit patients into studies and integrate the collection and reporting of research data within the healthcare workflow. Join what’s sure to be a lively discussion on this intriguing project, the privacy issues introduced by it and the solutions put forward.

Roland Krause, TMF e.V., Berlin
Pierre-Yves Lastic, R&D Data Privacy Officer, Sanofi

What you’ll take away:

An overview of the project from a member of the EHR4CR Executive Committee and Ethics Board
The privacy issues faced by the project and the solutions used to resolve them from the leader of the EHR4CR Privacy and Security Group

This comparative law paper focuses on sports arbitration and compares three sets of rules: German national DIS Sport Arbitration Rules1, internal procedural rules by National Federations like Deutscher Fußballbund2 and international CAS arbitral proceedings. Although quite similar, the procedural approach varies due to a different legal tradition3. For example, DIS does not provide for a consultation while the CAS rules do.
Germany was a latecomer to the international arbitration scene4, largely due to an outdated arbitration law and the lack of an internationally recognised arbitration institution5. As of 1 January 2008 the German Institution of Arbitration has established the German Court of Arbitration for Sport6. By contrasting the jurisdiction of each institution and thus delimiting the field of jurisdiction of the German Court and the CAS, comparative charts and graphics point out the areas in which exclusive jurisdiction of one of theses institutions exists.
Various reasons may lead to international sports federations being prevented from enforcing their sanctions on an equal basis. External sport governance and internal political pressure may lead a national federation to either facing international sporting exclusion or internally the discontinuation of state funding7, or the state accreditation/support/recognition of its policies, not to mention judicial sanctions in case of contempt of a national court’s decision.
Concluding remarks from a judge’s viewpoint outline the reasons behind the recent changes and give recommendations for future changes of the arbitral proceeding rules in Germany. Reasons include the need for faster proceedings, higher arbitration fees, electronic court files, clearer wording and transparency of the proceedings8, more opportunities for involvement for young colleagues9, and more chances for support and recognition within political circles10.
1 www.dis-arb.de/sport
2 http://www.dfb.de/index.php?id=504064
3 DFB has created its own “homegrown” rules , others (www.vdst.de) copy the Civil Procedure Code
or refer to Criminal procedure law.
4 Until recently, German law excluded recourse to arbitration, a point that states should take into consideration when implementing arbitration clauses in favour of a specific arbitral institution.
5 The European & Middle Eastern Arbitration Review 2009,
http://www.globalarbitrationreview.com/reviews/14/sections/54/chapters/521/germany/
6 Mertens, SpuRt 2008, 180
7 The German horseriding federation being dissolved and thus prevented from national funding:
www.tagesspiegel.de/sport/deutscher-reitsport-nicht-mehr-fest-im-sattel/1532284.html
8 For online publication of rulings, cf.Vieweg, SpuRT 2009, 192
9 Those interested who are sport- as well as ADR-lovers and not necessarily legal scholars.
10 Especially in doping cases, the aim of politicians for “clean games“ is rising.

A B ST R ACT. Disability rights advocates and commentators agree that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has veered far off course from the Act's mandate of protecting people with actual or perceived disabilities from discrimination. They likewise agree that the fault lies in the language of the statute itself and in the courts' so-called literalist reading of its definition of disability. As a result, many disability rights advocates have pinned their hopes for doctrinal reform on the proposed ADA Restoration Act, now in congressional committee. Although the Act would likely be a boon to plaintiffs, its chances of passage are uncertain. This Article tells a very different story of the problem and its solution. I agree that blame should fall on the courts, but not for reading the statute too closely. Rather, they have not read it closely enough. A truly rigorous interpretation of the ADA would expose a structural ambiguity in the regarded-as prong of the disability definition, with important consequences for interpretation. Although this ambiguity is a basic onethe kind that we resolve every day without thinking about it-it creates what is in fact a nine-way ambiguity in the statute. The courts have to date overlooked all but one of a corresponding nine readings; the other eight are effectively lost. Drawing on ordinary intuitions about sentence meaning, and borrowing some basic conceptual tools from formal linguistics, this Article aims to make ambiguity in the regarded-as prong visible to the reader. This opens the door to invoking the ADA's rich legislative history for the purpose of resolving the ambiguity. Such history favors a broad reading of the statute and would mark a departure from an era of increasingly narrow interpretation of the ADA's disability definition. Thus, while it may be a surprising alliance to consider, formal linguistic rigor in the hands of civil rights advocates holds the potential to realign ADA jurisprudence with the statute's purpose.

Statutory interpretation dilemmas arise in all areas of law, where we often script them as scenes of conflict between a statute's literal text and its animating purpose. This article argues that, for an important class of disputes, this supposed discord between text and purpose is an illusion. In fact, lawyers are overlooking ambiguities of literal meaning that align well with statutory purpose. The form of ambiguity in question inheres not in individual words, but at the level of the sentence. What triggers a split in readings are verbs that linguists classify as "opaque," which are perfectly common in legal texts: intend, impersonate, endeavor, and regard are among them. In ordinary speech we resolve their dual readings unconsciously and without difficulty. In law, however, our failure to notice multiple readings of ambiguous language has left a trail of analytically misguided judicial determinations and doctrinal incoherence across a broad swath of law, from disability rights to white collar crime to identity fraud to genocide. Drawing on examples from these areas, this Article uses the tools of formal semantics to expose the ambiguity of opaque constructions and to make visible the family resemblance among the ways we misinterpret them. It then turns to the question of why lawyers misread and what we can do about it. The converging literatures of language development and the psychology of reasoning suggest an answer. When we analyze opaque sentences explicitly as statutory interpretation requires (as opposed to spontaneously in conversation), we may be particularly vulnerable to cognitive bias. Factors peculiar to law tend to amplify and propagate this bias instead of dampen and contain it, but they may also point the way toward more sophisticated and reliable legal reading.

The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area-social activism. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, citizens are forming groups to report on human rights violations and organize email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. Because the demands of human rights work often require organizations to professionalize in order to be successful in their advocacy, human rights provides an ideal case study for evaluating the effect of lowered barriers to online group formation on citizen participation in activism. This article considers whether the participatory potential of technology can be used to both broaden the mobilization of ordinary citizens in human rights advocacy and provide opportunities for individuals to become more deeply involved in the work.

The growth of collaborative technologies has spurred the development of projects such as Wikipedia, in which large groups of volunteers contribute to production in a decentralized and open format. The author analyzes how these methods of peer-based production can be applied to advance international human rights as well as the limitations of such a model in this field. An underlying characteristic of peer-based production, amateurism, increases capacity and participation. However, the involvement of ordinary individuals in the production of human rights reporting is also its greatest disadvantage, since human rights reports generated by citizen activists are less likely to be perceived as accurate, thereby detracting from the effectiveness of those reports. The author examines methods by which these disadvantages might be overcome and concludes by advocating for a collaborative approach, whereby peer-based production is augmented by training and certification by local professionals.