Ten years have elapsed since the first Tobacco Advertising judgment, in which the Court for the first time concluded that the EU legislature had stepped beyond the limits of its competence to harmonize national laws which is granted by the Treaty. However, those subsequently seeking annulment of measures of harmonization have almost all been disappointed. This paper surveys the accumulated case law and finds that the “limits” of EU legislative competence, though of the highest constitutional significance in principle, are in practice imprecisely defined by the Treaty itself with the consequence that the legislative institutions enjoy wide discretion. The pattern has become circular: the Court presents a formula which defines the proper scope of harmonization and which sets out the control exercised by the principles of proportionality and subsidiarity, the EU legislature duly adopts the approved but reliably vague vocabulary and, provided the drafting is well-chosen, the Court has no plausible basis on which to set aside the legislative act. Case law dealing with the limits of EU competence has been converted into no more than a “drafting guide.” The paper shows how many of these deficiencies have been maintained uncritically after the reforms made by the Lisbon Treaty, even though a major part of the reform agenda initiated by the Laeken Declaration was inspired by “competence sensitivity.” Lisbon has instead put most of its reforming faith in a new recruit to competence monitoring - the national parliaments of the Member States. These new arrangements are poorly shaped at the level of detail, but the paper concludes with a largely positive assessment of the intention behind them. In particular they reveal a proper insistence on the need to supplement judicial control, which has become largely ineffective, with fresher political sensitivity to the perils of over-hasty centralization.

In socially responsible investment terms, Germany is a contradiction. The country is considered by many as one of the pioneers of post-war environmentalism and social reform. Yet, German financial institutions are amongst the European laggards in adopting environmentally and socially informed approaches to investment. This article identifies a variety of legal, institutional and attitudinal factors which hinder the growth of the German SRI market. Its paltry size does not reflect evidence of any specific disinterest among German investors in social and environmental issues. Rather, it arises from a combination of structural impediments, particularly the institutional arrangements for German pension schemes that hinder their participation in financial markets, regulations which encourage conservative investments, and investors' preference for low-risk assets and avoidance of shareholder activism. Legal and institutional reforms over the past decade have in theory created better opportunities for SRI in Germany, although they have yet to engender significant changes in the market.

There is no uniform approach to assessing scholarly publications in legal research. Peer review is still the most accepted form, but the popularity of bibliometrics, such as the impact scores of journals and the citation scores of individual articles is increasing. However, there is no ranking of European law journals and none is likely to materialise any time soon. Comparing the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, we will demonstrate why both peer review and the use of metrics have serious shortcomings. We believe it is necessary to think about such alternatives as more attention for methodological justification in legal research, more clarity from editorial boards about the quality criteria being used to approve or reject submissions, and more emphasis on standards for different forms of legal scholarship. Last but not least, we call for a Europe-wide debate on the pros and cons of different systems of research assessment, rather than let every country reinvent the wheel.

Since May 2004 Polish administrative courts have passed a great deal of judgments in which the law of the European Union (formerly European Community law) has played either the main role or a subsidiary role in the proceedings. This article seeks to examine how the above-mentioned courts comply with the expectations which are put on them by EU law and how they participate in the process of legal integration within the EU. In this context, the author scrutinizes how the national judiciary adjudicating in the administrative law area understands, interprets, employs and applies the systemic principles of EU law such as: supremacy, and (in) direct effect and effectiveness. In addition, the participation of national courts in the process of a dialogue with the Court of Justice of the European Union through the preliminary ruling procedure is captured. The analysis is not aimed at being exhaustive and focuses solely on the total impact of EU law on the national judiciary and the general trends in the judicial application of EU law, that is to say the overall reception of EU law and the dimension of the EU-friendliness displayed by Polish administrative courts.

Social media is a dominating force in modern social life as internet technology has taken hold of our cyber-driven society. Many scholars, as will be explored below, have articulated fears and enthusiasm about what can be interpreted as a reconfiguration of privacy in a culture mediated by technology. Scholarship ranges from those opposing new conception of privacy in favour of protecting rights in traditional private/public distinctions with privacy as a privilege worthy of proprietary protection to those reveling in opening floodgates for information to re-invent or even destroy any semblance of traditional distinctions of privacy. These poles become even more accentuated in light of fast-proliferating technology illustrated by popular social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare etc. In the North-American debate, the privacy concerns connected with these developments are compounded further by the U. S. Supreme Court's recent decision, Nelson v. NASA, which involves the constitutional right of government to ask for employee's personal information in the context of national security and surveillance.

In four judgements of 13 January 2011 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg returned to the issues raised in its earlier jurisprudence regarding preventive detention (“Sicherungsverwahrung”) under German criminal law. In its decision of 17 December 2009, M. v. Germany, the Court had held that the German Criminal Law's retroactive extension of confinement in preventive detention failed to meet the requirement of lawful detention “after conviction” under Art. 5 § 1 (a) of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereinafter “the Convention”), and violates the prohibition of retroactivity (Art. 7 § 1 of the Convention). The articles read as follows: