This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by ...dictatorial governments. The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal historiography, and if so, what can be said of its common features. The individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that situate between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Hungary. The approach is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice, as they appeared in the writings of legal historians of the socialist legal orders. Such an angle enables concentration on the dynamics between politics and law as well as identities and legal history. Studying the socialist interpretations of legal history reveals the ways in which the 20th century legal scholars, situated between legal renewal and political guidance gave legitimacy to, struggled to come to terms with, and sketched the future of the socialist legal orders. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal History, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law and European Studies.
Die Studie deutet die in diesem Heft zu diskutierenden methodologischen Prämissen von Michael Stolleis als stark von seinem Münchener Lehrer Sten Gagnér geprägt. Gagnér entwickelte in den 1960er ...Jahren in Auseinandersetzung mit dem skandinavischen Rechtsrealismus und den Philosophischen Untersuchungen von Ludwig Wittgenstein ein rechtshistorisches Methodenprogramm, das die Rekonstruktion von Sprachspielen unter Einbeziehung des Sprachkontexts in den Mittelpunkt rückte. Damit hing eine Kritik an der zeitgenössischen deutschen Rechtshistoriografie zusammen, der Gagnér Metaphysik vorwarf. Stolleis nahm dieses Denken im Münchener Seminar von Gagnér auf und blieb diesen Grundüberzeugungen lebenslang treu.
Abstract
Germany is the country of legal methodology. No other country saw such an intense academic discourse on the question of what jurists are able, allowed, and supposed to do when interpreting ...and applying the law. This German peculiarity is tightly linked to the history of the German Civil Code (BGB). Carefully worded and systematically precise, this codification had the potential to significantly limit judicial freedom; thus, its advent marked the beginning of the German methodological debates. The following Article examines this relationship, starting with the year 1874 (when preliminary work on the Civil Code began) and continuing with an analysis of the five political systems during which the BGB was in force: the German Empire (1900–1914), the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the National Socialist period (1933–1945), the GDR (1949–1989), and the Federal Republic (1949–today). With the exception of the GDR, the methodological debates consistently show attempts to enable judges to adapt the law to real life conditions, or to political ideas in conflict with the BGB, without formally moving beyond extant law. At the roots of 20
th
century methodological debates, one can thus discern a profound mistrust of German legal academia with regard to both the legislature and the judiciary. Jurists had no confidence in the BGB, which was criticized for being inflexible, outdated, and politically unsound. They did not trust in the freedom of judges either, trying instead to somehow bind them, be it to “life,” “reality,” “justice,” “sense of justice,” “national order,” or “Christian Natural Law.” It was not until 1958 that the Federal Constitutional Court was entrusted with the task of dynamically shaping the guiding values of society, thus forcing both the legislator and the courts to adapt the BGB to these principles. As a consequence, the heyday of German methodological debates surrounding the BGB slowly came to an end.
Within the archaea, the thermoacidophilic crenarchaeote Sulfolobus solfataricus has become an important model organism for physiology and biochemistry, comparative and functional genomics, as well ...as, more recently also for systems biology approaches. Within the Sulfolobus Systems Biology (“SulfoSYS”)-project the effect of changing growth temperatures on a metabolic network is investigated at the systems level by integrating genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and enzymatic information for production of a silicon cell-model. The network under investigation is the central carbohydrate metabolism. The generation of high-quality quantitative data, which is critical for the investigation of biological systems and the successful integration of the different datasets, derived for example from high-throughput approaches (e.g., transcriptome or proteome analyses), requires the application and compliance of uniform standard protocols, e.g., for growth and handling of the organism as well as the “-omics” approaches. Here, we report on the establishment and implementation of standard operating procedures for the different wet-lab and in silico techniques that are applied within the SulfoSYS-project and that we believe can be useful for future projects on Sulfolobus or (hyper)thermophiles in general. Beside established techniques, it includes new methodologies like strain surveillance, the improved identification of membrane proteins and the application of crenarchaeal metabolomics.
About 1800, the concept of a strict separation between private and public law arose in German doctrine. The debate dealt with two questions. How should this private autonomy be defended against ...stately interests? Some argued philosophically (Volksgeist), others frankly politically. The second and decisive question was to know which legal institution was reliable enough to receive the task to protect the private law from the State. Unlike in other European states, the idea to protect private law with the help of the constitution was not the first choice for many jurists in Germany. Members of the Historical School preferred the judges to be entrusted with the above mentioned task. In the context of private law, jurists thought in national dimensions without a national state. Private law relied therefore on the Ius Commune, a law without a state legislator. When the German states were unified to form the Reich in 1871, for the first time, private law was associated with the entire state. With the social question arising, a new discussion about the relationship between private law and the state emerged.
SulfoSYS (Sulfolobus Systems Biology) focuses on the study of the CCM (central carbohydrate metabolism) of Sulfolobus solfataricus and its regulation under temperature variation at the systems level. ...In Archaea, carbohydrates are metabolized by modifications of the classical pathways known from Bacteria or Eukarya, e.g. the unusual branched ED (Entner-Doudoroff) pathway, which is utilized for glucose degradation in S. solfataricus. This archaeal model organism of choice is a thermoacidophilic crenarchaeon that optimally grows at 80 degrees C (60-92 degrees C) and pH 2-4. In general, life at high temperature requires very efficient adaptation to temperature changes, which is most difficult to deal with for organisms, and it is unclear how biological networks can withstand and respond to such changes. This integrative project combines genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic, as well as kinetic and biochemical information. The final goal of SulfoSYS is the construction of a silicon cell model for this part of the living cell that will enable computation of the CCM network. In the present paper, we report on one of the first archaeal systems biology projects.
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