The U.S. & German Bench and Bar Gathering, “A New Bridge Across the Atlantic,” held in Washington, DC, in May 2012, was aptly timed to discuss the developments in German and American patent law. The Federal Circuit Bar Association and the Patentanwaltskammer (German Patent Lawyers Association) brought distinguished judges and attorneys from their respective countries to discuss the current state of the two patent systems. This involved consideration of where the two systems might be converging and why the two countries have had dissimilar litigation patterns. Particularly with respect to the latter of these inquiries, much of the debate throughout the conference focused on the differences in litigation discovery and procedural rules. The conference highlighted the fact that, at the most fundamental level, these differences are a product of differing perceptions of how justice should be administered. A brief overview comparing patent litigation in Germany and the United States will help frame this report.

This paper argues that we should move on from what has become a rather outdated contrast between the political constitution and the legal constitution. Taking as its focus the constitution of the United Kingdom, the paper analyzes the contemporary constitutional order as a mixed system of politics and law combined. It argues that such a mix may be a more compelling and attractive system than either the model of the political constitution or that of the legal constitution.

Regulation EC No. 1007/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 September 2009 banned the placement of seal products in the EU market. The measure has been very controversial, triggering a strong reaction, both from neighboring exporting States, in particular Canada and Norway, and from indigenous people living in the Arctic region. Seal hunting represents a traditional practice carried out for the purpose of personal consumption of seal meat, as well as for commercial trade of related by-products by the indigenous communities (mainly Inuit) living in the Northern Pole.

A well-known maxim of all kinds of legal realism is that the identity of judges matters a great deal. The most famous account of this tenet is the apocryphal statement attributed to Jerome Frank declaring that what matters in the law is “what the judge ate for breakfast.” While Frank never put that in print, he did say that the “peculiar traits, disposition, biases and habits of the particular judge will, then, often determine what he decides to be the law;” in short, that “the personality of the judge is the pivotal factor in law administration.” A more epigrammatic and elegant summary of this position was given by none other than Carl Schmitt, who declared that “[w]hat matters for the reality of legal life is who decides.”

What do public debates on the appointment of constitutional judges tell us about the view of the law and judicial adjudication? Fernando Muñoz's article focuses on the debates regarding the appointments of Justice Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court and Minister Bertelsen to the Constitutional Court in Chile. According to the author, these debates reflect the tension between two views of the law and judicial adjudication—autonomy and responsiveness—as to how judges should deal with extra-legal considerations in performing their functions. While the autonomy position tries to “defend the substantive values of the law by policing the distinction between the legal and the extra-legal,” the responsiveness position claims that “the law ought to extract its substance from social expectations, needs, and priorities, serving them as a means to an end.” In the author's view, Sotomayor's supporters and Bertelsen's opponents would uphold responsiveness and defend the need of the judiciary to respond to social expectations and needs, whereas Sotomayor's opponents and Bertelsen's supporters would uphold autonomy. The participants on these debates seek to gain hegemony regarding their views on what the law is and how constitutional adjudication should be conducted.

We are living in a world in which the moral legitimacy of cultures, religions, ideologies, and the practices of states, international organizations, and even corporations is being measured against human rights norms. The moral significance of and practical respect for human rights has grown so much that human rights have been described as a global religion, and a new standard for civilization. International trade, a popular and much debated issue of our time, is one of those phenomena that is currently being measured against the standards of human rights. Leading experts remain divided about whether global trade is good or bad for human rights. There are those who are utterly convinced that the world trade regime has a mutual basis with human rights and see potential in the growth of one as a positive sign for the other. There are also those who, on the other hand, are equally convinced that human rights and international trade regimes are in a relationship of enmity.

In this paper we are going to analyze how constitutional courts are able to extract the most meaning from a, necessarily, short text, such as a constitution, with the use of sophisticated tricks, or methods, of interpretation. Partly with the help of these methods, and partly on the basis of text-independent speculations, constitutional courts and legal scholars are able to develop a system of concepts (a Rechtsdogmatik, or its specific constitutional part, the Verfassungsdogmatik) considerably more sophisticated than the one of the actual text of the constitution in order to serve as a helping toolkit for the solution of future cases. After analyzing some preliminary issues in part A, the largest part of this study will deal with the different methods of constitutional interpretation in part B. Then, the nature of this conceptual system will be analyzed in part C, before turning to the question of styles of constitutional reasoning in part D. The analysis concentrates on the practice of European constitutional courts, though for purposes of classification and comparison, non-European practices will also be mentioned.

The central purpose of this paper is to show that there are no major differences in the methods of constitutional interpretation in countries with varying degrees of judicial review. Despite the fact that legal culture and traditions, underlying political theories, and values all affect methods of interpretation, there is no big gap in constitutional interpretation in practice in view of wide interpretive discretion. Obviously all legal systems require compliance with some fundamental interpretive standards irrespective of the legal system, and in a democratic society judicial decisions should be justified at least to avoid arbitrariness. The question is what are the limits beyond which judges cannot go in constitutional democracies? Hence, the style and method of legal argumentation that are used to justify the decision may differ in the countries belonging to different legal systems. Whether there are significant differences between the common law and civil law, constitutional interpretation will be assessed through the comparative analysis of the United States Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court.

In his paper The Impact of Legal Systems on Constitutional Interpretation: A Comparative Analysis: The U.S. Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court, Arshakyan carries out an interesting and detailed comparison between American and German constitutional courts by individualizing the properties shared by both courts and identifying the differences.

Although long considered alien to the civil law tradition, the publication of separate dissenting or concurring opinions is now permitted by the majority of European constitutional courts, the only exceptions being the Austrian, Belgian, French, Italian, and Luxembourgish constitutional courts. The decades-long history of dissenting opinions in the practice of several European constitutional courts calls for an analysis. While there is an extensive literature in the United States regarding the use of dissenting opinions, comprehensive empirical research is still absent in Europe. American scholars have conducted research from several different points of view. Legal scholars have dealt primarily with the relationship between dissenting opinions and the doctrine of binding precedent, and have tried to solve the problem of the precedential value of plurality decisions, e.g. decisions lacking a reasoning shared by the majority of the judges. Political scientists, for their part, have studied the policy-making role of judges and strategic opinion-writing. Scholars of law and economics have analyzed the costs and benefits of writing separately. Even judges themselves have often expressed their own thoughts in essays or conference speeches on the matter.

The principle of proportionality is on the rise. A growing number of constitutional and international courts refer to some form of proportionality in their jurisprudence. At the same time, the principle is receiving more and more attention in international legal scholarship. Yet proportionality has not remained uncontested. In particular, some scholars have severely criticized the core of the proportionality test, which involves a balancing of competing values. This balancing is accused of being irrational because it requires placing incommensurable values on the same scale. In a famous dictum, Judge Scalia once claimed that balancing competing constitutional values is like determining “whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.”

This paper aims at explaining the basic logical structure of proportionality assessments, under the assumption that such assessments are based on quantitative reasoning, even when no numbers are given.