This chapter examines the defensive measures provisions of the EU Takeover Directive of 2004 in the light of the changing policy orientation of both the EU Commission and the Member States towards the role of takeovers in relation to industrial policy. As far as the Commission is concerned, it charts a decline from initial enthusiasm for the threat of the hostile takeover as a central tool for promoting the Union’s industrial policy, via acceptance that the Directive would not achieve this goal because of Member State opposition, to at least partial acceptance of the arguments against making the control of companies contestable. The second half of the chapter analyses whether the failure of the Commission’s initial plans for defensive measures can truly be regarded as a missed opportunity, because those proposals would have been of limited importance, even if enacted. The chapter concludes that the ‘shareholder structure’ and ‘pre-bid defences’ versions of the argument that the Commission’s proposals were trivial carry more weight than the argument that other provisions of national company law already achieved the Commission’s goal.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.

This chapter explores how victims have participated in unofficial transitional justice efforts involving non-state armed groups. Using the memoir of Seamus Kearney in the Northern Ireland context as a case study, we critically examine how victims participate in what we argue to be ‘quiet’ transitional justice efforts. Our discussion centres around two interlinked foci: the story told about how Kearney unofficially engaged with the Irish Republican Army in the pursuit of acknowledgement and truth; and how his memoir represents a participatory space where he leads in narrating the experience of ‘quiet’ transitional justice. Arguing that his memoir is, and contains, evidence of victim-led transitional justice, we juxtapose Kearney’s agency in the ‘quiet’ transitional justice process with his more passive role within formal truth recovery mechanisms. In doing so, we expand the transitional justice imagination on the place and role of victims beyond their engagement with formal mechanisms.

This chapter uses the Latin American case studies presented in the previous chapters to identify general cross-national patterns and historically ground the theory and statistical findings about transitional justice’s (TJ) violence prevention effect. It first shows that during the Cold War all six countries developed counterinsurgent states with striking similarities under autocracy. In all cases, authoritarian specialists in violence capitalized on their power to kill with impunity to dominate the criminal underworld. It then discusses how TJ was a fork in the road. The adoption of robust TJ processes, combining strong truth commissions and criminal prosecution of perpetrators, allowed Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala to dismantle counterinsurgent states, preventing criminal wars and reducing violence and gross human rights violations. But the persistence of state impunity and the survival of the counterinsurgent state led to Wars on Drugs or Gangs or Crime and to turf wars that resulted in mass atrocities in Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil. The final section discusses how in cases with robust TJ the institutionalization of accountability policies can contribute to the development of self-sustaining peaceful democracies, and how a reformulated TJ toolkit can serve democracies with persistent impunity, trapped in deadly criminal wars, enter into paths of peaceful reconstruction.

This chapter builds on the assumption that constitutional references to the historical constitution can contribute to the community building process in Hungary. While this assumption itself might be contended, this paper puts aside the question of whether the Hungarian historical constitution could be revived in legal terms or whether it could have legally binding force in any way. Instead, it will approach the question from a non-legalistic point of view and consider whether references to the Hungarian historical constitution might be useful and desirable from the perspective of community building. To put it briefly, this chapter contends that it might be useful and desirable but only under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, whether these conditions prevail can only be established retrospectively.

Law students routinely forget that the legal tradition has been concerned with fact finding for centuries. The entire body of evidence law has evolved for two important purposes: ensuring that the evidence presented to a court is legally admissible; and ensuring that the evidence presented to the court is reliable so that the tribunal of fact is able to draw conclusions about whether or not an alleged fact existed in circumstances where the tribunal of fact has not witnessed the event for itself. Legal reasoning is empirically grounded and draws upon centuries of human experience in the examination of materials of this kind. With that in mind, principles from evidence law can be used to help us to think about facts as part of the analysis of a legal problem. Indeed, turning your mind to the rich body of evidence law is essential. It is not possible in a book like this to engage with evidence law in any detail. Evidence law in Australia is comprehensively examined by several authoritative authors, to which the reader is referred to for detail.

The aim of this chapter is to offer a study of the role of Europe (and European integration) in the Italian constitutional imagination. The argument identifies three phases which have shaped the way European integration (and more generally the horizon of European political unity) has been perceived by Italian constitutional actors (and especially by political parties). The first phase goes from 1943 to 1946 and is animated by a majority consensus for European political integration, with the exception of the Communist Party. The second phase, starting from the inception of the Constituent Assembly, is one where the telos of European unity does not occupy a central position in the constitutional imagination any longer, and it is ‘downgraded’ to a question of ordinary politics. The third phase (whose beginning can be conventionally identified with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty) is one where European integration makes a comeback in the constitutional imagination but under the guise of the external bound. In conclusion, the chapter advances the hypothesis that this last phase is marked by the incapacity of Italian political parties to struggle for a constitutional imagination that is not colonised by markets and their imperatives.