On Thursday, there were gale force winds all over Germany and a tornado did quite some damage in Saxony. The wind had a visible effect on the water in this Nuremberg fountain.

Udo Vetter in law blog weist auf eine Meldung der Polizeipresse.

According to a report of the Central Franconia police news, on the evening of June 22nd a Danish couple driving north from Austria arrived in the city of Nuremberg after following a diversion. The 68-year-old husband park on Leipziger Platz, took the car key with him (!) and went into an underground public lavatory, whence he failed to find his car. Three hours of wandering later, he arrived at a police station, but as he spoke neither German nor English, communication was difficult – despite the help of an interpreter who offered her services free of charge by phone (who might this interpreter be, I wonder). The Danish woman locked in the car had a mobile phone with her but hadn’t switched it on. The couple were not reunited until 1 a.m., at which time they decided to sleep the rest of the night in the car.

Die Süddeutsche berichtet etwas einseitig über amerikanische Schadensersatzurteile. Die Geschworenen sprechen oft Summen zu, die später vom Richter korrigiert werden. Hinzu kommt, dass in den USA Strafschadensersatz ein Teil des Systems ist. Der Artikel beschreibt auch Professor Lester Brickman von Cardozo Law School als Professor Lester Brickman-Cardozo.

An article in the Süddeutsche about damages awards and class actions in the USA warms up all the old chestnuts. It also refers to Professor Lester Brickman of Cardozo Law School as Professor Lester Brickman-Cardozo.

Asbestos claims are obviously Professor Brickman’s speciality and I have not investigated the subject further. Here is a transcript of him on the topic. It looks, though, as if a particular argument against class actions has been padded with the usual suspects:

bq. Schadenersatzprozesse basieren auf angelsächsischen Rechtsprinzipien. Der Ausgang der Prozesse ist für die Beklagten häufig ein Glücksspiel. Laienrichter, die von den komplizierten Sachverhalten häufig nur wenig verstehen, sind an der Urteilsfindung beteiligt.
Kein Zufall, dass sogar abstrus erscheinenden Klagen stattgegeben wurde, die aus europäischem Rechtsverständnis kaum eine Chance oder viel bescheidenere Schadensersatzsummen zur Folge gehabt hätten.

This is followed by a reference to a Florida case where a waitress spilled hot coffee on a man, injuring him, the jury awarded a huge sum of damages, and it appears from a web search that the award was later reduced. Is this an ‘abstrus erscheinende Klage’?

bq. Punitive Damages — Like most Floridians, I have heard the outrageous story where millions of dollars were awarded as punitive damages against a restaurant whose hot coffee spilled and injured someone. For the most part, we hear about these extreme cases when juries award excessive punitive damages, but not when trial judges or appellate courts later reduce the awards to reasonable levels, as happened in the coffee-spill case.

(Via Juristisches und Sonstiges)

One of the most bizarre cultural experiences on German TV is the German-dubbed version of Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef. Repeats of the first series are nearly over, on Saturday mornings on RTLII. Maybe they’ll repeat the later series next.

So bizarre is the German dubbing that I was obliged to get a DVD so I could compare the English and German versions.

Jamie Oliver is quite a media curiosity in the original, and here he is shown on German TV to viewers who have not gradually been prepared by watching Gary Rhodes, Nigella Lawson, The Two Fat Ladies and Nigel Slater, and for whom one of the most exciting TV food programmes is the avuncular Alfred Biolek with guests. It must be a shock.

Presumably to outdo the competition, he is shown outside the kitchen only in action, sliding down the banisters, dashing out on his scooter (blurred images) to small shops where everyone knows him. In most episodes he has met up with friends to engage in activities new to him (going to dog races, go-karting). How far is he, or was he in this first programme, a product of the media?

This must have been made with an international market in mind, and conveniently most of the recipes need no quantities or adaptation, although things like double cream or the coriander leaves you can get on every corner (but not in Franconia) are glossed over. The idea is good ingredients, half a pound of fresh herbs on everything, and quick simple dishes, often very good. (The recipes can often be found on the Internet, including on the RTLII site linked above and on the BBC site).

The main problem for the translator seems to be Jamie’s Mockney (mock Cockney) speech. He comes from North Essex and his sister sounds much more normal. I don’t think it’s quite estuary English that he speaks – perhaps he started with estuary and then played up the Cockney element. An example:
JO: I’m gonna lightly flour the old surface (‘the old’)
DE: Als erstes etwas Mehl.

For more examples, continue reading. Continue reading →

In einem amerikanischen Artikel wird argumentiert, dass ausländisches Recht auf verschiedener Weise in amerikanische Urteile eingehen kann, dass ein ausländisches Urteil aber nicht als Präzedenzfall herhalten darf.

In legal affairs, Judge Richard Posner writes: ‘No Thanks, We Already Have Our Own Laws – The court should never view a foreign legal decision as a precedent in any way’

The article argues that it is OK to incorporate foreign law into American law:

bq. Suppose a judge happened to read a decision of the German Constitutional Court concerning the right to an abortion and found in it an argument against abortion (or perhaps facts about the motives for or procedures of abortion) that he hadn’t seen before and that he found persuasive. Suppose he wanted either to give credit where credit was due or simply to identify a source, because judges, like most other lawyers, are obsessive citers (a reflex designed to conceal the subjective and unstable character of much legal reasoning). Or the foreign decision might be material in a legal sense, for example, because of a choice-of-law provision in the contract on which the U.S. suit was based, or because the foreign decision was claimed to have a pre-emptive effect in a U.S. litigation. These would be cases in which foreign law was incorporated into American law.

Claims and defences may also be based on international law. But foreign decisions may not be used as precedents.

bq. Problems arise only when the foreign decision is believed to have some (even if quite attenuated) persuasive force in an American court merely by virtue of being the decision of a recognized legal tribunal. This occurs, in short, when it is treated as an authority, albeit not a controlling one, in a U.S. lawsuit even though the issue is purely local, such as whether abortion should be forbidden, or the execution of retarded murderers forbidden, or gay marriage allowed.

Posner goes into some detail on this.

bq. To know how much weight to give to, say, the decision of the German Constitutional Court in an abortion case, you would want to know such things as how the judges of that court are appointed and how German constitutional judges conceive of their role. You would especially want to know how German attitudes toward abortion have been shaped by peculiarities of German history, notably the abortion jurisprudence of the Weimar Republic, which is thought to have set the stage for some of Nazi Germany’s legal atrocities, such as involuntary euthanasia. And, speaking of history, it seems highly likely that the European rejection of the death penalty, which advocates of abolition in the United States cite as evidence for an emerging international consensus that ought to influence our Supreme Court, is related to two things: the past overuse of the penalty by European nations (think only of the executions for petty larceny in 18th-century England, the Reign of Terror in France, and the rampant employment of the death penalty by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union); and the less democratic cast of European politics, which makes elite opinion more likely to override public opinion there than in the United States. For example, public opinion in the United Kingdom supports the death penalty as strongly as public opinion in the United States does, yet Parliament repealed the death penalty (except for some military crimes) in 1965 and has since steadily refused to reconsider.

(Via The Curmudgeonly Clerk)

In connection with a mailing-list query on how to translate Rechtspfleger into Italian, the European Union of Rechtspfleger was mentioned.

Until a few years ago, there was a registrar at the English county courts, a kind of sub-judge, who seemed similar to the German Rechtspfleger. But these were renamed district judges and so I hesitate to use the term – not everybody understood it even when it was generally used, and still fewer now. And there were always other registrars: registrars of births, deaths and marriages, company registrars.

The website of this ‘European Union’ is odd. Their symbol recalls the EU and uses the 12 stars, but the reference is to the Council of Europe (Europarat), which surely doesn’t use the stars? Very misleading. They appear to call themselves – in English – greffier/Rechtspfleger. They appear to have links with the Justices’ Clerks’ Society in England and Wales, but that is something quite different – a justices’ clerk is a lawyer who advises lay magistrates.

Unfortunately the English on their site leaves much to be desired, if I may mention that sore point again:

Rechtspfleger are judicial officials to whom judicial tasks were transferred to be done by themselves in their own responsibility. They belong to the higher staff of the judicial organisation, the transfer of judicial tasks needs an at least three years lasting, highly qualified formation.