It is commonplace in current legal scholarship that pay packages for executives that were not tied to the impact of these executives' policies on shareholder wealth maximization often caused harm to shareholder interests and their companies, especially in the long term. The no-pay-without-performance postulate is as old as the first global economic crisis of the 20th century – the deep depression. Since then, this postulate has been repeated and substantiated innumerous times by the majority of experts in corporate law and business economics, but without real success. There are, however, commentators who deny the existence of a link between skewed incentive pay, excessive risk-taking, and financial losses. They instead insist on the superiority of the traditional director-centric model of corporate governance, which would allegedly preserve the balance that has generally worked well between the limited role and limited liability of shareholders and the active role, fiduciary duties, and potential liability of managers, which allegedly renders additional executive pay regulation unnecessary.

A shareholder vote on executive compensation, the so-called “say on pay”, has become one of the most prominent corporate governance tools for regulators in their urge to tackle excessive executive remuneration. Its implementation in the United Kingdom in August 2002 has triggered–not least because of a Recommendation of 2004 by the European Commission–a broader discussion of this instrument which gradually led to the adoption of related rules throughout Europe. In Germany, a “say on pay” was enacted by the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) as part of the Act on the Appropriateness of Management Board Compensation (Gesetz zur Angemessenheit der Vorstandsvergütung–VorstAG) on 18 June 2009, it passed the second chamber of the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundesrat) on 5 July 2009 and was promulgated in the legal gazette (Bundesgesetzblatt) on 31 July 2009. The new law became effective on 5 August 2009. In the meantime, the United States also enacted provisions with respect to a shareholder vote on executive compensation. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, often only referred to as the “Dodd-Frank-Act”, introduced a mandatory, non-binding “say on pay”, as well as a more specific shareholder vote on payments in the context of a change of control (“golden parachutes”). The SEC recently adopted rules in order to implement these provisions.

The law is a living organism, which is reflected by the ever-evolving landscape of international criminal law. Time and again, conflicts demonstrate the many ways in which human beings can hurt each other. The law must be able to anticipate and react to these cruelties. On the one hand, the law must be specific enough to assure legal certainty and prevent arbitrary convictions; on the other hand, it must be broad and general enough to keep up with developments in real life and cover previously unimagined behavior. Forced marriage is an example of such a criminal phenomenon, which, even though the taking of brides by the victor has for centuries been a common occurrence during conflict situations, has only recently appeared in the international limelight. When the international community is confronted with criminal practices that are not codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, it is faced with the daunting task of legally characterizing this conduct: can the act in question be brought within the ambit of the core crimes of the Rome Statute? And if so, how is it best criminalized: as a war crime, a form of genocide, or a crime against humanity?

Human existence and dignity, just like human unity itself, are not actually rights. The essence of humanity, as regards the law, is inaccessible. Because of this, human life and dignity are included in the catalogue of human rights and in modern constitutions as the sources of rights, as inviolable values beyond the law. The law must guarantee that these inviolable values are respected and protected.

During the past months the European Council agenda has been dominated by Europe's economic crisis, which combines elements of banking crisis in the euro area and individual Member States' debt crisis – and has turned into something of an existential crisis for the Union as a whole. Many questions concerning the Union's legitimacy have been raised in the context of the current debates pointing out how the role of democratic institutions has turned blurry while market pressure has been tackled in quickly developing institutional structures by taking fast decisions on major economic commitments involving a tightened belt both for those receiving the aid, and for those giving the necessary guarantees required by the creditors. As the crisis has evolved, these questions have become more or less fundamental in nature since they have increasingly encompassed the trust in the possibilities of the Union to manage the crisis through its own decision-making. But at the same time, crises also bring about potential for change.

This year is designated the “European Year of Citizens”. It marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the European Union citizenship under the Treaty of Maastricht. It is important to ask what exactly will be celebrated on this occasion. Specifically, which rights did the European peoples gain by virtue of their so-called fundamental status of EU citizenship, and were the guarantees embedded in those rights satisfactory? This article will address these questions by focusing on the social rights field, a field which has been dramatically affected by the development of the European Union citizenship concept.

The privatization of Kosovo's socially owned property and enterprises differs significantly from privatization programs undertaken in other countries, especially in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe when they transitioned from communism to democracy and free market systems. What is unique about Kosovo's privatization program is that it was designed and implemented under the authority of the United Nations at a time when Kosovo was directly administered by the United Nations. It is perhaps so far the only privatization program that was initiated and implemented by the United Nations under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. Various other international organizations, such as the European Union, played a significant role in this process as part of their responsibilities in the administration of Kosovo. An obvious question is what the United Nations would have to do with privatization in the context of territorial administration under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter and if the United Nation's authority to administer Kosovo would include the authority to privatize property, the legal nature of which was unclear even when it was developed in former Yugoslavia. The discussion of these and other legal questions and controversies which are related to the privatization process in Kosovo are the main subject of this article, with a focus on the role of the United Nations and the European Union in this process.

On 14 February 2008, German prosecutors and investigative authorities made a sensational catch. That day, it became public that they had initiated criminal investigations against Klaus Zumwinkel, then head of the DAX-listed corporation Deutsche Post. Additionally, the top manager's villa in Cologne was searched in a dawn raid and, as the media apparently had been tipped off, TV cameras could film the corporate executive while accompanied out of his home by prosecutor Margit Lichtinghagen. About one year later, Zumwinkel, no longer head of Deutsche Post, was convicted of tax evasion to two years of prison placed on probation. Although hailed by many as a triumph for the prosecution of white-collar crimes and the fight against corporate executives' recklessness, some already questioned the approach of prosecutors and investigators in the early stages. This criticism first and foremost referred to the fact that important information used as evidence in the investigations as well as the subsequent criminal court proceedings stemmed from banking data “stolen” by a Liechtenstein banker from his (former) employer Liechtenstein Global Trust, a bank based in Liechtenstein, and subsequently purchased by German authorities. This phenomenon, the purchase of “stolen banking data by German authorities, was not unprecedented as the so called “Liechtenstein tax affair” (“Liechtensteinische Steueraffäre”) had already been going on for some time. Zumwinkel, however, was the first widely known defendant in that context.

It is now almost two decades since the German Constitutional Court proclaimed in Maastricht its capacity to review whether the Union institutions respect the limits of their conferred competences and to pronounce inapplicable at national level all legal instruments adopted by them in transgression of these boundaries. This ultra vires doctrine inspired the case law of several other constitutional courts, which announced their intention to operate in exceptional circumstances as an ultima ratio against the violation by the Union institutions of the principle of conferral. The German Constitutional Court itself emphatically reaffirmed on various occasions its role as the ultimate protector of constitutionality against the ultra vires introduction and interpretation of Union law, most prominently in its eminent Lisbon ruling. Until recently though, there was no actual precedent of a national court proclaiming a Union act as ultra vires. Even when a constitutional court reviewed the contested act on ultra vires grounds, it eventually concluded that it complied with the principle of conferred powers.