This isn’t a weekly terminology roundup at all, it’s a test to see if I want to do something like this.

What I wonder is, if I read various mailing lists and forums, how far I should acknowledge them. I imagine some want a link, but others want privacy protected. I think I’ll make a list of regular sources, and keep that separate from the list, which would mainly contain my remarks.

The first example is a term that was hard to solve online:

verantwortliche Vernehmung: this term came up on one list in March, but context was lacking and there were no useful replies. Questions on legal terminology should contain context, and even a list of words is a context – there is no such thing as ‘no context’! And they should say if the term is German, Austrian or Swiss, and if the target is the USA, Britain or elsewhere.
This time, on an ITI list, there was a suggestion from someone who knows the police: interview under caution.
Problems here: someone suggested responsible, because there are plenty of ghits on reponsible interrogation. But without knowing what the German means, that is not conclusive. Googling the German term did not produce a specific definition, nor did my public prosecutor’s book by Heghmanns. But there was plenty of indirect evidence. I found a reference that said you can’t have an erste verantwortliche Vernehmung of a child because the child could not be convicted – which sounds like ‘you can’t caution a child because a child cannot incriminate itself’.

I didn’t pursue it further, but I think it may be a term used in police practice to refer to something defined under a different term in the Code of Criminal Procedure.

AZR: no, this does not stand for Allgemeines Zivilrecht in Revision, but it does refer to Revisionen at the BAG: if it is part of a file number like 2 AZR 754/97 there’s no need to expand it, let alone explain it in a footnote.
(For correction see comments: all these file no. abbreviations are listed in the back of Dieter Meyer, Juristische Fremdwörter, Fachausdrücke und Abkürzungen, which is a small guide to abbreviations for students and very useful – for statutes use Kirchner / Butz, Abkürzungsverzeichnis der Rechtssprache, and in Austria AZR (!), Abkürzungs- und Zitierregeln der österreichischen Rechtssprache und europarechtlicher Rechtsquellen)

legal eagle: a discussion on ProZ came up with: Topjurist, Spitzenjurist, Spitzenanwalt, Rechtsguru and Starjurist

public law can mean öffentliches Recht, but in the context queried it meant a statute that had been passed but had not yet been incorporated into a code – it has the abbreviation PL as a reference. It comes up in the middle of a Wikipedia entry:

Congress
A Public Law, or P.L., is designated by the number of the Congress, a hyphen and the order in which the law is enacted. P.L. are later signed into law by the U.S. President.

I wonder if this is another reason why I associate the word law meaning a statute particularly with the USA (see earlier entry).

LATER NOTE (see comments) A public law remains so named even after it is in the Code. Black’s says (inter alia):

Federal public laws are first published in Statutes at Large and are eventually collected by subject in the U.S. Code.

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Law says:

bq. an enactment of a legislature that affects the public at large throughout the entire territory (as a state or nation) which is subject to the jurisdiction of the legislature or within a particular subdivision of its jurisdiction.

Kaufmann: In connection with a query on the word Kaufmann, I gather (I should have known this) that the new Austrian Commercial Code has replaced Kaufmann by entrepreneur. The definition is not the same, though. Anyway, here’s a nice English-language reference on the topic from legalweek.com: Central and Eastern Europe: a universal code

The term kaufmann (merchant) has been replaced by unternehmer (entrepreneur) as the main subject of the code. This is more than merely cosmetics. In accordance with the Austrian Consumer Protection Act, the new commercial code defines an entrepreneur broadly as any economic enterprise being performed permanently and independently in an organised manner, even if not aimed at making a profit. This results in the long-overdue harmonisation of the definition of entrepreneur in both the consumer protection and commercial laws. As a consequence, small enterprises now generally fall under the new commercial regime

.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that even in Austria you can now translate Kaufmann as entrepreneur. It still needs to be merchant.

LATER NOTE: the Yahoo group finanztrans is now having a poll as to how to translate the new Austrian Unternehmensgesetz. The choice is as follows: Austrian Companies Act, Austrian Commercial Code, Austrian Enterprise Act, Austrian Business Code, Austrian Corporation Code, or Austrian Firm Code.

I would prefer Enterprise Code (one’s allowed to suggest one’s own alternative) or (new) Commercial Code.

I didn’t think I’d find myself praising an initiative for immigrants here, but I am impressed by the intercultural garden near the River Rednitz. It is like a set of allotments with no fences in between. 28 gardeners of 19 nationalities have plots 25 metres square. Some children from two multinational kindergartens use it too. The man from Kosovo plants squashes and honeydew melons (only from the Balkans) and a banana tree, the Vietnamese teach others how to cook squash leaves, there are frames constructed of branches to carry pumpkins that have spread from one plot to another. Many immigrants come from a farming background and live in flats without gardens.

A young watermelon plant (what chance has it got?):

I have been meaning to write something about German allotments and now Sarah Webb has done the work for me in the expat part of the Telegraph. She has succeeded in renting an allotment in Bremen, and renting one is an achievement in itself.

There are 15 parts to it, the lengthiest being the paragraph on Nutzung or “use of the garden”! These rules and regulations often have nothing to do with the more modern view that a garden is recreational rather than purely functional.
But what strikes one as classically Germanic in the contract are details such as the specified limit of 1m, 10cm for a hedge – and these things are checked.
This gives the gardens a certain uniformity which I for one could do without. However, to be fair, it is often this desire for uniformity which keeps standards maintained.

Wikipedia gives some impression of the difference between a British allotment and a German Schrebergarten. Here is the Bundeskleingartengesetz and here something on Kleingartenrecht.

The word Rechtsbehelf is a problem to translate into English. I will quote my earlier entry:

Rechtsbehelfe are either 1) Rechtsmittel – appeals to a higher court (Berufung, Revision, Beschwerde) or 2) [nameless] – appeals on the same level (Einspruch, Widerspruch, Erinnerung, Gegenvorstellung)
I think I would call the whole lot appeals.

I suppose people who use the term in German aren’t always sure what they’re saying. Or maybe they don’t understand the word recourse in English.

Sue Turton, the Channel Four journalist whose bum was pinched by a passer-by as she was reporting live from the floods (video), said (my emphasis):

I’ve no desire to punish this man through the courts. But I did wonder if I accepted such behaviour without complaint what hope do women who are groped in public in this way have of any recourse?
I personally found the matter quite humiliating and somewhat disrespectful to the plight of those I was reporting about.
Some may say I’m being prudish. It’s true I’ve been in much more threatening situations throughout my reporting career, but they were in far flung places where personal space isn’t a priority.

The German version:

Turton wolle ihn nicht anzeigen, sagt sie. Jedoch die Polizei solle ihm auf die Finger klopfen, “welche Hoffnung auf Rechtsbehelf können Frauen ansonsten überhaupt haben”, so Turton.

He’s going to get a fixed-penalty notice (something like a Bußgeldbescheid).

Thames Valley Police have asked Channel 4 News for a video of the incident – which can also be viewed on YouTube – and told MediaGuardian.co.uk that they intended to issue the culprit with an £80 fixed-penalty notice for a public order offence.

Now obviously Sue Turton didn’t want an appeal – she doesn’t even want first-instance proceedings. She meant something like Abhilfe, although not quite that. Of course I suppose remedy is a synonym, but (see the same earlier entry) that isn’t easy to translate either.

But what happened in this case? The German who translated the text was not quite familiar with either the English or the German term, but knew they sounded vaguely legal, so they must be right?

(Via Werner Siebers)

There has been some discussion of stopping the solidarity surcharge paid together with German income tax since reunification, although it was supposed to end years ago. The Independent has an article on the subject today:

Ten per cent of the world’s taxation literature refers to the German tax system. There are 118 laws, 185 forms, 418 exceptions and 96,000 regulations, with one single legal comment on taxation alone covering 2,671 pages.
The administration of the German tax laws runs to a spine-numbing 28,000 pages and administrating it costs €23.7bn a year – approximately 2.5 per cent of the total amount of income tax yielded annually.
With such a magnificent and costly bureaucracy to maintain, the opponents of the soli tax fear it will be around to haunt their children and grandchildren as much as it does them.

The Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice) has held that an advertising campaign by Kelloggs in 2003, ‘Kellogg’s [the apostrophe remains part of the name even in German – see comments] Frosties für den Schulsport’, violates competition law. The action was started by a consumer umbrella organization, vzbv (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband). The judgment has not yet been published.

Der Bundesgerichtshof hat nach vierjähriger Verfahrensdauer eine im Jahr 2003 durchgeführte Werbeaktion der Firma Kellogg “Kellogg’s Frosties für den Schulsport” als wettbewerbswidrig erachtet. Die Werbung sei geeignet, die geschäftliche Unerfahrenheit von Kindern und Jugendlichen auszunutzen, lautete das in der vergangenen Woche verkündete Urteil. Mit dem Musterverfahren wollte der vzbv klären lassen, wo die Grenzen der Schulwerbung liegen. “Wir hoffen, dass mit den Grundsätzen des Bundesgerichtshofs der immer weiter um sich greifenden Kommerzialisierung an Schulen dauerhaft Einhalt geboten werden kann”, kommentierte vzbv-Vorstand Prof. Dr. Edda Müller den Richterspruch.

The idea was that children collected Tony dollars (Tony Taler) from Kelloggs products and exchanged them for sports goods for their school. To get a badminton set for 50 Taler, you had to buy about 59 packets of Frosties at EUR 2.79 each.

The IPKAT has heard of this and says it couldn’t happen in Britain – British schools would just take the money.

The IPKat says, this case accentuates a big cultural difference between the Germans and the British. The Germans say, here’s a a cynical abuse of childish desire for the sake of marketing a big commercial brand. The Brits say, “come on, let’s buy some more cereal before the offer expires!”. Merpel says, it is a cynical exploitation, yes – but is it wrong to do it in a free market in which all Kellogg’s competitors are able to do exactly the same thing?

Yes, if we could stop everything that children could become addicted to to the impoverishment of their parents, we would certainly not stop at Kellogg’s Frosties.

Here’s something from a British school from the Google cache:

Kellogg’s amicable Frosties character, Tony the Tiger, paid a surprise visit to the school. He distributed a mixed selection of Kellogg’s cereal bars to the four year old children attending the Kindergarten classes.
Kellogg’s cereal bars are a new and healthy snack that can be eaten at breakfast or at any time of the day. They are delicious and rich in cereals and come in different tastes. The bars are individually wrapped and are convenient for a quick snack.