Volume 10, Issue 1

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, credit rating agencies (CRAs) have come under open criticism in the public and legal discourse. The picture that has broken the surface is one in which CRAs ended up compromising the quality of their activities in order to facilitate the selling of services and snatch or defend market shares in a thriving environment. Nevertheless, in the U.S. and in Europe, CRAs still are almost immune from any form of civil liability, and the regulatory approaches still content themselves with focusing on the use of the same administrative tools that have so far proved to be largely ineffective. All this explains why the debate has started questioning the reasonableness of keeping the private for-profit nature of the agencies, instead of straightforwardly transforming them into public bodies. But the answer about the optimal nature of, and the most appropriate deterrence model for the agencies may only come from considering a different perspective, which puts in place, not a national/regional plan aimed to fence off local misbehavior, but a global strategy to ensure worldwide appropriate accountability for CRAs. In this direction, the issue can be tackled under either a centralized-political, or a decentralized-judicial point of view.

In an increasingly interconnected world, where the widespread travel of goods highlights our interconnectedness, who has the power to decide the global regulations that shape the production, processing and exchange of agri-food products? How are such decisions made and by whom? Who decides what is safe to eat? Whose definition of safe is used? Where is the way to the new cosmopolitanism? In this article we seek out answers to these questions through an analysis of global food safety regulation. We review the current legal structure of global agri-food governance and consider limitations in decision-making models, restricted transparency, limited public participation and insufficient democratic guarantees.Global food regulation necessitates transparent, participative and impartial mechanisms of policy- and rule-making. However, a common global regulation must also consider and respect pluralism. We argue that the harmonization of global food regulation thus needs to follow a democratic pattern which pursues integration without compromising pluralism, and reduces fragmentation without denying legal and cultural differences. In this context, we propose a model for global decision-making that combines associative and deliberative democracy. We then propose a plan to engage the public in policy-making by using an interactive procedural mechanism of deliberation and by engaging civil society organisations in decision-making. Enhanced civil society participation in global agri-food governance has the capacity to increase efficiency, impartiality, transparency and democracy in the global policy-making process.

The aim of this paper is to suggest that the development of a common European legal language could be effectively achieved by means of a truly European legal education. The educational dimension of European law, as opposed to its substantive dimension, is briefly described in its current state, before putting forward a proposal for a new model. This proposal needs to be developed with reference also to the North American system of legal education, whose uniformity, at least at the highest level, allows the development of a common legal language. Therefore, I briefly describe the method and content of the North American legal education, as well as the critiques it has received.Taking these premises into account, I build a model curriculum for European legal education, which borrows some features from the North American model of legal education, but maintains some European peculiarities, since it recognizes and supports the undeniable role that national legal systems play in the field of legal education.This new model of European legal education is described through five elements. As for the addressees, this model should try to have a degree of attractiveness also towards non-European students; the selection process has to take place before entering the law school and also during the course of study; the funding of the universities should become more and more independent from public funds, which however could still play an important role if well allocated; the professors are key-figures in this model, since they act as a trait d'union between its different components; finally, as for the regulation of studies, I stress the importance of comparative law as a method and I suggest a course structure composed of three years focused on national legislation and two years focused on teaching common law of Europe.

In 1991, Colombia established a Constitutional Court with expansive powers to protect rights. The power to nominate members of the Court was placed in the hands of the President along with the Supreme Court and Administrative Court. In 2008, fourteen Colombian NGOs formed the Elección Visible, a coalition designed to ensure greater accountability in Constitutional Court nominations by the two higher courts and by the President. In this study I explore the roots of the resulting clash between the Elección Visible and the nominating courts. In my study I concentrated on the nomination process that took place at the Supreme and Administrative Courts, since President Uribe flatly ignored the NGOs demands for more accountability in the nomination process and kept his nomination picks concealed until the very last minute. I show that the conflict between nominating Courts and the NGOs arose when NGO demands for accountability through a more transparent nomination process were resisted by the nominating courts in the name of judicial independence. Moreover, I show that Administrative and Supreme Court's Justices decide whom to nominate according to subjective, political, ideological and personal criteria. In particular, I argue that the Administrative Court relies on a traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy in making its Constitutional Courts nominations, while the judgments of the Supreme Court rely heavily on assessments of loyalty towards the Supreme Court once the candidate is appointed to the Constitutional Court. The cost of admitting these “hidden" nomination criteria publicly in a legal system such as the Colombian—still highly formalistic and based on a model of Judge who adjudicates based only on “the law"—is far too high. Therefore, Justices had strong incentives to conceal the “real" nomination criteria from the efforts by Elección Visible to ensure greater transparency.

The author analyzes the relationship between religion and constitutionalism. The time seems propitious for an examination of the relationships in the West between Church/es, the State, and the general principles of “constitutionalism," a definition which cannot be separated from the analysis of its historical and secular roots.It is not arbitrary to explain constitutionalism as a product of a “long process of secularization, however, the idea of secularism (laicïté, in French) has never been clearly defined. On the contrary, it has often been the source of tension, for example the debate on the common Judeo-Christian heritage in Europe, during the drafting of the EU's Constitutional Treaty.In the West this is an era of unprecedented religious diversity. In some States one religion still predominates; in others, religious representatives have a formal political role, for example, the bishops who sit in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom where, as in Greece, a national Church remains a reality. Nevertheless, the separation between Church and State is, generally, the prevailing principle in the institutions of the Western legal systems and their politics. In any case, the “religion issue" still remains an important aspect of liberal constitutionalism which is a legal model that contains institutionalized mechanisms of power control to prevent tyranny and to guarantee individual rights and liberties, including religious freedom.The author will try to demonstrate that the discourse of human rights – a pillar of modern-contemporary constitutionalism – offers, both at national and supranational level, space for re-defining (i.e. re-inventing) the meaning and boundaries of sovereign power because it is more compatible with some fundamental principles, such as human dignity, rule of law, liberty of religion and conscience; as well as a more “homogeneous definition" of a secularized constitutional legal system.

This article argues that multinational enterprises (MNEs) have state-granted international legal personality. MNEs are now granted substantive and procedural rights under international investment treaties, ratified by 162 states. Under international investment law, MNEs are empowered as centrally-controlled agents, permitted to launch indirect investment claims from various points along their ownership networks in investment arbitration. As entities with legal personality, MNEs hold the customary duties of private persons under international law, including the duty not to commit slavery, among others. The article concludes by discussing the relevance of MNE legal personality to the amelioration of the MNE governance gap.

Islamic law as a sum total of juristic views believed and practiced by Muslims, by and large, is locked in interpretations made by legal scholars of the medieval ages. To relate it to contemporary needs of the Ummah, Muslim thinkers have been entangled with the question of its renewal for the past two centuries. In this pursuit, the thorniest question has surrounded the methodology of accomplishing such a renewal. This has given rise to three main trends, namely traditionalist, liberal and middle of the road approaches to the renewal of Islamic law. This paper, however, argues that rejuvenating Muslim religious law requires a synthetic method rather than a bigoted exclusivist approach as advocated by the proponents of renewal in our time.

In this paper I argue that international law sees secession as a matter for and of politics. Therefore, this law cannot give us an answer to the many questions raised by secession. We might need to examine the issue of secession from the vantage point of political philosophy. However, liberal political theories of secession do not take into account the realities of much of the armed separatist conflict in the postcolonial world. Given the harm that is caused by secession, the only way out to deflect the movement is to institutionalize the preconditions of self determination for groups within the state. Secession will remain a right, but a weak one, liable to be outweighed by other moral considerations.

Insurance and privacy are two important issues in our society. Insurance, in the way that we know it nowadays, had its origin in the 14th century, in Genoa, where one of the first legislative initiatives took place. Since then, insurance has become more important in the international scenario, becoming one of the main guarantees for trade and industry.It has played a fundamental role in the maintenance of individual property, in the preservation of family and in the preservation of health. However, the need to protect the right to privacy started to be discussed only at the end of the 19th century, after the publication of the famous article “The Right to Privacy," written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren. In this article the authors recognize the need to protect privacy, but they do not take into account the protection of personal data, which started to be discussed only in the second half of the 20th century. Since “the right to be let alone," the right to privacy acquired a much larger and protective scope than the one thought by those authors.This enlargement of the scope of privacy is confirmed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which recognizes, in its article 8, the right to the protection of personal data as an autonomous right, demonstrating its importance for our society.Moreover, the advance of information technologies, biomedicine, and genetic engineering in the last decades has led to discussions about the necessity to protect genetic data with the objective of preventing discrimination, since specific genetic exams can accurately determine whether a person will develop a certain disease.These new forms of identifying individuals and of collecting their personal data have enormous relevance for insurance contracts, since the main element of the insurance is risk, and, for that reason, insurers collect and use information about individuals to analyze the risk they represent and to establish premiums.Taking into account this close relationship between insurance, privacy and new technologies, this paper aims to establish the limits on collection and use of personal data on risk analysis and insurance underwriting in EU Law, using as a method the analysis of the EU Directives concerning data protection, specially the Directive 95/46/EC and the recommendations of the Article 29 Working Party, together with a bibliographic review of the European and international doctrine about the subject.