For some of those who support the Lisbon Treaty, it is difficult to accept that a 53% majority of the 53% voting electorate of a country of a population of 4.4 million should, by voting to reject ratification of the Treaty, single-handedly bring to a halt a process which involves 27 countries with a combined population of almost 500 million. Their point is that there are undemocratic consequences for the whole of Europe if the Lisbon Treaty does not enter into force as a result of the referendum defeat in Ireland, and therefore they argue that there are democratic reasons for objecting to the agreed legal consequences of the result of the Irish referendum. This only holds if we manage to forget, for a moment, that the decision to make the implementation of the Treaty conditional on the unanimous support of all Member States was never something that was at the whim of the Irish electorate, and if we manage to endorse, for a moment, the argument that respecting the effect that an individual Member State's national constitutional and democratic procedures have on the other Member States is only important if lots of people live there. Furthermore, the credibility of the argument depends, in significant part, on the credibility of its three (dubious) assumptions: that Europe has one unified ‘demos’; that democracy means majoritarianism by reference to that single demos; and that, even though the peoples of the other 26 Member States were not consulted prior to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in their countries, they were accurately represented by their governments who approved ratification. It is noteworthy, however, that there should be an objection to the agreed legal consequences of the Lisbon Treaty rejection which claims for itself the democratic high-ground.

The destruction of the tower of Babylon led, or so we are told, to the emergence of different linguistic groups. Meant to be a punishment to mankind for having had the audacity to try to erect that tower, mankind has fervently embraced that punishment i.e. the resulting linguistic differences. Indeed, there is a body of legal scholarship promoting linguistic rights as constituting essential human rights. But there is another side to that story: it may well be considered that not so much the linguistic differences as such but the fervency of their embrace has been the real punishment.

The law must correspond with human nature and be based on criteria equal to all human beings. Many schools of legal philosophy agree on these points. However, many of them tend to disagree as soon as more detailed criteria for “humanity” and the “nature of man” are suggested. This is where the empirical understandings of basic needs clash with loftier concepts such as “reason” and “spirit” over what the actual indicators of humanity are. Relativistic schools point skeptically to the plurality and historicity of many legal convictions. Proceduralists look for a way out of the vagueness and controversy of appropriate indicators of humanity and human law by relying on concretization processes. Such processes are expected to exclude at least violence and in the best case include as much integration as possible of all those affected by legal provisions. This paper proposes that the most important insights into good and human law can be discovered by analyzing the character of human agency (Handeln). All life forms usually act in a functional manner, doing what is required to preserve themselves; many animals are able to learn and communicate to a certain extent. By contrast, humans not only “behave”, rather, they “act” - they sense, interpret, evaluate, articulate and decide. As trivial as that sounds, using “human action” as an indicator of what aspects a good legal system should represent is an illuminating starting point. This is especially true concerning hard cases in the law that, in spite of being typically contested, lead to legally binding decisions. They are burdened by the “anthropological cross of decision-making” or, as one could also say, the “decisional cross”. The question we will turn to is the meaning of the decisional cross.

The scope of judicial review of administrative decisions is one of the most important issues in administrative law. The question of the scope of judicial review is a typical problem of public law. Prior to the decision of an administrative law court, there is usually a decision of a public agency. In contrast to that, civil or criminal law cases begin without a state-run decision because these courts have to judge the behavior of private persons. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court held that if it determines Congress has not addressed the question at issue, “the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation [emphasis added].” Summarized in a simple formula, one can say that civil and criminal courts decide, while administrative and constitutional courts control.

On 23 July 2008, the President of the French Republic promulgated – two days after the final vote of the two chambers of Parliament sitting jointly in Congrès (Congress) – the constitutional revision bill “de modernisation des institutions de la Vème République” (of modernization of the institutions of the Fifth Republic) n° 2008–724. The bill was mainly based on the research work done by a comité des sages (expert committee) “de réflexion et de proposition sur la modernisation et le rééquilibrage des institutions de la Vème République” (for the reflection and the proposition on the modernization and rebalancing of the institutions of the Fifth Republic). It had been presented by the Government to Parliament on 23 April 2008 and twice voted for by the Assemblée Nationale (National Assembly) and the Sénat (Senate).

The analogy, perhaps a bit strained, was made by Advocate General Jarabo Colomer, in his final attempt to trace as sharp as possible the boundary between the European arrest warrant, which is mainly a judicial tool aimed at granting legal assistance in criminal matters among Member States, and extradition, an intergovernmental procedure having a political goal, as provided in a number of international and European conventions, with the latter being adopted under article K 3 of the Maastricht Treaty, and which were all replaced as of 1 January 2004, by framework decision 2002/584/JHA (the Justice and Home Affairs Council) relating, specifically, to the European arrest warrant (the “Framework Decision”).

One of the cornerstones of the law of armed conflicts, known under the term of “international humanitarian law”, is the so-called “Geneva Law”. Bearing in mind the experiences of the Second World War, Geneva Law was an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) initiative to focus codification on the protection of the individual from the ravages of war. Today it mainly consists of the four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the two Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977. However, since the end of the 1970s, further development of the codified body of international humanitarian law has slowed, not least because the international community, given the number of armed conflicts taking place, has become reluctant to accept further obligations.