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Posted by: Jenny Gesley
The following is a guest post by Supreetha Sampath Kumar, a foreign law intern at the Law Library of Congress. This blog post is part of our Frequently Asked Legal Questions series. On November 8, 2016, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, announced the “notebandi” initiative, declaring that the use of all Rupees (Rs.) 500 and …
Posted in: Frequently Asked Legal Questions (FALQ), Global Law, Guest Post, In the News
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
The North German Confederation (Norddeutscher Bund) is generally considered the first modern German Federation. Before that time, there were 39 different sovereign states, varying in size, that were loosely associated in the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund). The North German Federation came into existence with the adoption of the Constitution of the North German Confederation by the German Reichstag …
Posted in: Global Law
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
Tax season is upon us, and most people will not start filing their tax return until the very last moment. Statistics show that the majority of people file in April or even the week of April 15, the usual filing deadline. Sound familiar? In such a case, it helps to be organized and have all …
Posted in: Global Law
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
On March 25, 1957 – 60 years ago tomorrow – the governments of France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the “Treaties of Rome”, thereby establishing what would later become the European Union (EU). The “Treaties of Rome” consist of two different treaties: the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC Treaty) and the Treaty establishing the European …
Posted in: Global Law, In the News
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
In the summer of 2016, a little known provision of the German criminal code received international attention when it was invoked by the Turkish government on behalf of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who felt insulted by a poem written by the German satirist Jan Böhmermann. According to section 103 of the German Criminal Code, …
Posted in: Global Law, In the News
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) held a referendum on whether to leave or to remain in the European Union (so called “Brexit”) with 51.9% of the people voting in favor of leaving. The withdrawal procedure from the European Union (EU) is governed by article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), …
Posted in: Global Law, In the News
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
On my recent visit to Düsseldorf, Germany, I could not stop my nerdy lawyer self from visiting the Administrative Court of Düsseldorf (Verwaltungsgericht Düsseldorf). The Administrative Court in Düsseldorf is the court of first instance in administrative matters and handles all kinds of non-constitutional public law matters. Examples include disputes over building permits, access to public institutions and …
Posted in: Global Law, Pic of the Week
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
In September 2015, the German automaker Volkswagen (VW) admitted that it had manipulated software in around eleven million diesel vehicles worldwide to cheat on emissions tests. As more and more details emerged in the ensuing weeks and months, VW’s share value rapidly declined by 30 percent. U.S. regulators levied heavy fines of up to US$15.3 billion …
Posted in: Global Law, In the News
Posted by: Jenny Gesley
More and more internet traffic is encrypted. Encryption is a method of protecting electronic information by converting it into an unintelligible form (encoding) so that it can only be decoded with a key. Google stated in its latest transparency report that 85% of requests from around the world to Google’s servers used encrypted connections in …
Posted in: Education, Global Law, Law Library, Legal Reports