Without much doubt, the two great pillars of American scholarship on the German Basic Law and the jurisprudence of the Federal Constitutional Court are (in the order of first appearance) Donald Kommers's monumental casebook, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany and David Currie's magisterial treatise, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. Professor Kommers's comprehensive work was a milestone in a long career that has been very substantially devoted to the study of German constitutional law. In the late 1960s, Kommers spent a research year at the German Constitutional Court and, drawing in part on personal interviews with the justices, he published the first major work in English on that court. Since then, Kommers has produced a steady stream of significant works on German constitutional law.

David Currie devoted a substantial part of his scholarly work to exploring the intricacies of constitutional law, focusing intently on the United States and German constitutional orders. Along with Donald Kommers, Currie was among the first to closely examine the German constitutional system in a search for elucidation. As the quote by Thomas Mann (which he used in his seminal book, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany) illustrates, if we truly want to aspire to realize our talents and ambitions, it is important to look outside national borders to see how things are done elsewhere to discover if there are ways in which we can improve. Staying within the “City upon a Hill,” as many Americans identify the United States, may lead to insularity or, even, a sense of false confidence. Which is why the task of comparative law is so important: looking outside national borders to see what other perspectives are out there, and then comparing and contrasting the foreign and domestic to learn which, upon consideration, is better or worse and for what reasons.

The Federal Republic of Germany celebrated its fortieth birthday in 1989, and the sudden and unexpected accession of the former German Democratic Republic the following year has drawn the world's attention to the newly united nation. This article is the third installment in an effort to explain the basic features of the German constitution.

As Justice Miller's famous lament suggests, wishful thinkers have sought since the beginning to find a way of making the United States Supreme Court ultimate censor of the reasonableness of all governmental action. Justice Chase thought he had discovered the magic wand in natural law, Justice Bradley in the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Justice Goldberg in the Ninth Amendment. Miller battled bravely, but he had lent significant support to the enemy with his freewheeling opinion in Loan Association v. Topeka. The fire was kept flickering in dissent and in majority opinions upholding laws against due process and equal protection challenges only because they were reasonable. It burst into full flame in Lochner v. New York in 1905, and for the next quarter century the Supreme Court was indeed what Justice Miller had denied it should be: ultimate censor of the reasonableness of all governmental action.

Since the German Federal Constitutional Court's 1994 decision on the deployment of AWACS surveillance aircraft over the Adriatic Sea, it is one of the cornerstones of German constitutional law that Parliament (the Bundestag) needs to consent to the external use of German Armed Forces in situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is likely. However, the Bundestag may neither determine “the modalities, the dimension and the duration of the operations, nor the necessary coordination within and with the organs of international organizations.” As the requirement of constitutive parliamentary approval is not directly set out in the German Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court (in the following: FCC or the Court) derived it from the general constitutional framework. The concept of “parliamentary army”, designed by the Court, attempts to strike a balance between executive effectiveness and parliamentary participation.

Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TPC), much debated at both national and international levels, has recently been subject to an amendment aimed at clarifying its meaning and averting more distressing cases related to freedom of expression. It should be noted that the former article 301 was an amended version of article 159 of the former TPC of 1926. As Türkan Sancar rightly states in her comprehensive book on both articles 159 and 301, article 159 is an article which has been revised many times. It was amended seven times after coming into effect in 1926 (in 1936, 1938, 1946, 1961, twice in 2002, and 2003). The new TPC was introduced as a package of penal-law reform prior to the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of the European Union, and came into effect on 1 June 2005. Article 301 stated the following:

1. 1. A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be sentenced a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.

2. 2. A person who publicly denigrates the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial bodies of the State, the military or security organizations, shall be sentenced to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to two years.

3. 3. Where denigrating of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country, the penalty to be imposed shall be increased by one third.

4. 4. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime.

This article does not envisage an overwhelming goal to present a detailed X-ray of the recently much-discussed ECJ decisions in the field of social law, namely Laval and Viking. One could find several very profound papers whose authors thoroughly explore the various issues at stake, including the trade unions strategies in the frame of the EC Law, the role of the Posted Workers Directive, a horizontal direct effect in the context of the service-providing, the negotiation of wages and the Scandinavian social model. Therefore, the goal of this piece is to put Laval into the macroflora of a wider context, inherent to the effects of the post-enlargement labour conflict and its implications for the fundamentalization of social rights in the Union.