bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Constitutional Review of Tax Laws and the Unconstitutionality of the German Inheritance Tax
Authors: Lepsius Oliver 
Published: March 2019

AbstractConstitutional review of German tax laws has become a major area for the development of the jurisprudence of the German Federal Constitutional Court, constitutional doctrine, and theory. This Article takes a recent decision in which the German Federal Constitutional Court declared parts of the inheritance tax statute unconstitutional as an example to demonstrate why tax law in particular has become such an interesting field in constitutional jurisprudence. The case is also noteworthy for the court's new views on equal protection, its deference to parliamentary discretion, and the abolishment of the so-called consequentiality doctrine (Folgerichtigkeit) it had introduced ten years before.
A Decision on Inheritance Tax by the German Constitutional Court: A Brief Comment
Authors: Gaisbauer Helmut P. , Sedmak Clemens 
Published: March 2019

AbstractIn Germany, endowments and bequeathals are subject to between seven and fifty percent inheritance tax. Small and medium-sized family-run businesses are exempt from inheritance tax either partially or entirely. On 17 December 2014, Germany's Constitutional Court ruled that the present system of enabling businesses to “avoid paying” inheritance tax was in violation of the “rule of equal tax principal.” Furthermore, the inheritance tax law in its current form leaves plenty of leeway for variations in percentages of payments, which are difficult to justify. Thus, the Court ruled, existing laws are unconstitutional and must be reformed and replaced.In this case note we argue from a socio-ethical viewpoint that inheritances taxes are in principle morally justified. One important key element of the tax system is trust. This trust can be strengthened by (1) creating sustainable laws that will stand the test of constitutional screening, (2) offering plausible justification for fiscal policies including exemptions on clear normative principles like subsidiarity, common good, freedom and simplicity, and (3) broadening the tax-paying basis without undercutting relevant human agency.
A Review of EU Regulation of Sports Nutrition: Same Game, Different Rules
Authors: Varvaštian Samvel 
Published: March 2019

AbstractToday's athletes, both professionals and amateurs, use a wide range of different nutritional substances to increase training performance, improve the recovery process, burn fat, gain muscle mass, etc. Although such substances are not always thoroughly researched for their potential effect on humans, they are popular and easy to obtain. Therefore, an adequate regulatory system is needed to ensure the protection of consumers. Currently, however, there are no specific provisions with regard to sports nutrition in EU law; thus, such products are usually marketed as food supplements, fortified foods, dietetic foods, and/or foods with nutrition or health claims. This article reviews the relevant legislation with a particular emphasis on policy developments regarding sports nutrition.
Review by Constitutional Courts of the Obligation of National Courts of Last Instance to Refer a Preliminary Question to the Court of Justice of the EU
Authors: Lacchi Clelia 
Published: March 2019

The Constitutional Courts of a number of Member States exert a constitutional review on the obligation of national courts of last instance to make a reference for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).Pursuant to Article 267(3) TFEU, national courts of last instance, namely courts or tribunals against whose decisions there is no judicial remedy under national law, are required to refer to the CJEU for a preliminary question related to the interpretation of the Treaties or the validity and interpretation of acts of European Union (EU) institutions. The CJEU specified the exceptions to this obligation inCILFIT. Indeed, national courts of last instance have a crucial role according to the devolution to national judges of the task of ensuring, in collaboration with the CJEU, the full application of EU law in all Member States and the judicial protection of individuals’ rights under EU law. With preliminary references as the keystone of the EU judicial system, the cooperation of national judges with the CJEU forms part of the EU constitutional structure in accordance with Article 19(1) TEU.
Resistance to Anti-Discrimination Law in Central and Eastern Europe–a Post-Communist Legacy?
Authors: Havelková Barbara 
Published: March 2019

AbstractPost-communist Central and Eastern European ('CEE') legislators and judges have been resistant to equality and antidiscrimination law. This Article argues that these negative attitudes can be explained in part by the specific trajectory that EAL has taken in CEE during and after state socialism, which has differed from Western Europe. In the UK/EU, the formal guarantees of equal treatment and prohibitions of discrimination of the 1960s and 1970s were complemented by a more substantive understanding of equality in the 1990s and 2000s. This development was reversed in CEE—substantive equality, of a certain kind, preceded rather than followed formal equality and antidiscrimination guarantees.The State Socialist concern with equality was real, and yet the project was incomplete in several significant ways. It saw only socio-economic, but not socio-cultural inequalities (relating to dignity, identity or diversity). It was transformative with regards to class, but not other discrimination grounds, especially not gender. While equality was a constitutionally enshrined principle, there was an absence of any corresponding enforceable antidiscrimination right. Finally, the emphasis on the “natural” differences between the sexes meant that sex/gender discrimination was not recognized as conflicting with women's constitutional equality guarantees.
Böckenförde Theorem and Burqa Ban
Authors: Michaels Ralf 
Published: March 2019

When France and Belgium banned face veils in 2010 and 2011, they were the first European countries to do so in a comprehensive matter. Now Austria has its own ban, Denmark is on track to have one too, and several other countries are toying with the idea. Such bans are often considered incompatible with the rights of veil wearers (especially Muslim women). Less prominent is the question whether such bans are incompatible with the modern state.Such a critique can be grounded on the work of the leading German constitutional law scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and his famous dictum, according to which “[t]he liberal, secularized state draws its life from preconditions it cannot itself guarantee.” For Böckenförde, this means that headscarves, a different type of veil, cannot be banned—not because this would violate a woman's rights, but because it would undermine the very character of the state itself.The article transposes this argument from the German discourse over headscarves to the European discourse over face veils. It demonstrates the potential of Böckenförde's dictum for the face veil debate, but also its limitations.
Legal Harmonization Through Interfederal Cooperation: A Comparison of the Interfederal Harmonization of Law Through Uniform Law Conferences and Executive Intergovernmental Conferences
Authors: Klafki Anika 
Published: March 2019

AbstractModern federations are faced with the challenge of cross-state as well as cross-nation economic activities and with the ever-increasing mobility of society. This has not only promoted international law, but has also created the need for harmonized laws throughout federations within the competence areas of the states. Diverse laws within federal systems may increase transaction costs, cause delays, and lead to jurisdictional conflicts for nationwide or cross-state transactions. In order to preserve federalism, and therefore prevent an ever-advancing process of centralization, interfederal legal harmonization promoted by the states themselves is crucial. There are two distinct methods of legal harmonization of state laws: (1) harmonization by “Uniform Law Conferences,” which are in principle run by lawyers and thus independent, to a certain extent, from the influence of policy makers; and (2) harmonization by executive intergovernmental conferences. These two distinct models of interfederal legal harmonization will be analyzed and evaluated with regard to efficiency, compatibility with democratic principles, transparency, and accountability in a comparative legal study of the harmonization processes. This Article will scrutinize the federal systems of the United States and Canada, on the one hand, as well as those of Germany and Austria, on the other hand. The study will reveal that the efficiency of interfederal legal harmonization increases with the level of intergovernmental integration through the participation of government officials and their staff.
Judicial Self-Government as Experimental Constitutional Politics: The Case of Turkey
Authors: Çalı Başak , Durmuş Betül 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThis article traces the evolution of judicial self-government practices (JSG) in Turkey and argues that the frequent changes in JSG are part of a broader trajectory of experimental constitutional politics. The Council for Judges and Prosecutors has experienced sharp turns since its establishment in 1961, respectively in 1971, 1982, 2010, 2014 and 2017. During this period, Turkey experienced different forms of judicial councils ranging from co-option, hierarchical and executive controlled judicial council models to a more pluralistic model. The Justice Academy of Turkey has also not been immune from this experimentalism. The article discusses the endogenous relationship between these often short-lived experiments of JSG and their impacts on the independence, accountability, and legitimacy of the judiciary and public confidence in the judiciary. The article then turns to the repercussions of JSG on separation of powers and democratic principle. It focuses on the implications of the ambiguous position of the Council in the state structure for the separation of powers, and the revived debate on democratic legitimacy of JSG after the 2017 constitutional amendments.
The Rise and Fall of Judicial Self-Government in Poland: On Judicial Reform Reversing Democratic Transition
Authors: Śledzińska-Simon Anna 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThis article argues that the establishment of the National Council of the Judiciary in 1989 and the empowerment of the general assemblies of court judges gave rise to the idea of judicial self-government in Poland. This very idea of self-government, implying that judges hold important decision-making or veto powers on matters concerning the judiciary, was regarded as a precondition of the separation of powers and judicial independence, neither of which existed under Communist rule. However, the package of laws introduced in 2017 marks the end of judicial self-government as we know it. Not only did it undermine the independence of the National Council of the Judiciary by altering the mode of electing its judicial members, but it also concentrated the power over the judiciary in the hands of the executive branch, allowing for, inter alia, the exchange of key positions in court administration and the reconfiguration of the Supreme Court. This article examines the impact of this “reform” on such values as independence, accountability, and transparency. Investigating the role of judicial self-government in ensuring the principle of separation of powers and democracy, the article concludes with an assessment of the early consequences of the introduced changes for the Polish judiciary.
The Judicial Self-Government at the International Level — A New Research Agenda
Authors: Tsereteli Nino , Smekal Hubert 
Published: March 2019

AbstractThe phenomenon of judicial self-government at international courts has thus far been vastly understudied. Our article fills this gap and systematically explores its personal dimension, both from formal and informal perspectives. Specifically, we focus on the selection, promotion, and removal of international judges. We build our analysis on studying legal instruments, such as constitutive treaties, statutes, and rules of procedure, which we subsequently supplement by anecdotal evidence of how they work in practice. We show that each international court is unique in terms of the forms and extent of participation of its judges in deciding on international judicial careers. There is a variation as regards the forms and degree of judicial self-government across international courts and across the relevant areas of decision-making for each court. However, some broader patterns and trends emerge from our examination of relevant provisions and practices. First, some courts display consistently low degrees of judicial self-government across all these areas of decision-making, while other courts display relatively higher degrees. Second, judicial self-government does not manifest itself at the international level in entirely the same way as it does at the national level. We found that while judicial self-government manifests itself relatively strongly in the areas ofpromotionsandremovalsof international judges, it is limited in the area ofselectionof international judges. International courts are not, strictly speaking, self-governing in the latter area, because the sitting judges of these courts are rarely members of the bodies that decide or advise on selecting new judges. However, sitting judges of some international courts have become involved in the formation of the bodies screening candidates and/or in selecting the members of such bodies. Hence, judicial self-government has started manifesting itself in selection processes internationally, albeit in a limited fashion, with only indirect involvement of sitting international judges.
Exploring the Effects of Personal Information in Television	News
Authors: Barreda-Ángeles Miguel , Virgós Julia , Fedele Maddalena , Pereda-Baños Alexandre 
Published: March 2019

Abstract. We report the results of an experiment in which participants ( N = 41) watched a number of television news clips containing either personal or professional stories about celebrities, while measures of information encoding, storage, and retrieval were collected together with psychophysiological measures of autonomous nervous system activity. The results show that the presence of personal information elicits attentional resources allocation and improves memory for contents, suggesting that personal information benefits from a deeper cognitive processing compared with professional information. These findings provide preliminary evidence on the cognitive effects of personal information that encourages further research on several dimensions of media use such as fandom or gossip media from a cognitive point of view.
Stories and the Self
Authors: Krause Stefan , Appel Markus 
Published: March 2019

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.
The Impact of Noise in a GRACE/GOCE Global Gravity Model on a Local Quasi‐Geoid
Authors: Slobbe Cornelis , Klees Roland , Farahani Hassan H. , Huisman Lennard , Alberts Bas , Voet Pierre , Doncker Filip De 
Published: March 2019

AbstractWe present a local quasi‐geoid (QG) model which combines a satellite‐only global gravity model with local data sets using weighted least squares. The QG is computed for an area comprising the Netherlands, Belgium, and the southern North Sea. It uses a two‐scale spherical radial basis function model complemented by bias parameters to account for systematic errors in the local gravity data sets. Variance factors are estimated for the noise covariance matrices of all involved data sets using variance component estimation. The standard deviation (SD) of the differences between the computed QG and GPS/leveling data is 0.95 and 1.52 cm for the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively. The fact that the SD of the control data is about 0.60 and 1.20 cm for the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, points to a lower mean SD of the computed QG model of about 0.7 cm for the Netherlands and 1.0 cm for Belgium. The differences to a QG model computed with the remove‐compute‐restore technique range from −5.2 to 2.6 cm over the whole model domain and from −1.5 to 1.5 cm over the Netherlands and Belgium. A variogram analysis of the differences with respect to GPS/leveling data reveals a better performance of the computed QG model compared to a remove‐compute‐restore‐based QG model for wavelengths >100 km for Belgium but not for the Netherlands. The latter is due to the fact that at the spatial scales resolved by the global gravity model, variance component estimation assigns significantly lower weights to the local data set in favor of the global gravity model.
Vb Cyclones Synchronized With the Arctic‐/North Atlantic Oscillation
Authors: Hofstätter M. , Blöschl G. 
Published: March 2019

AbstractVb cyclones typically emerge in the Western Mediterranean and propagate to the Northeast into Central Europe. This paper explores the temporal characteristics of Vb cyclone occurrence based on cyclone tracks identified at the atmospheric levels of Z700 and sea level pressure, using JRA‐55 reanalysis data for the period 1959–2015. The risk of Vb occurrence was significantly high in the 1960s and has remained at a lower level since then. Vb cyclones do not occur fully randomly according to a Poisson point process. Eleven well‐separated and distinct clusters as well as 11 hiatus periods are identified, with average occurrence rates of 21.5 and 5.2 yrea−1, respectively. During the event of Vb, the large‐scale atmospheric circulation is changed into a state favoring the development of successive Vb cyclones. Clustering is very prominent in the case of Genoan Vb cyclones in summer as well as those Vb cyclones developing over the Iberian Peninsula or the North African Coast in winter. Superposition of the polar and the subtropical jet stream over the Western Mediterranean is identified as a main feature at the onset of Vb cyclones. Vb cyclone occurrence appears to be synchronized with the Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO; at Z500) and Arctic Oscillation (AO; at Z1000). Clusters have occurred when both NAO and AO were negative. This relation applies to Western Mediterranean cyclones not following a Vb track as well, however to a much weaker extent. In contrast, Vb cyclone frequency was particularly low from 1988 to 1997 during a sustained positive phase of both NAO and AO.
Distributions and Sources of Glycerol Dialkyl Glycerol Tetraethers in Sediment Cores From the Mariana Subduction Zone
Authors: Ta Kaiwen , Peng Xiaotong , Xu Hengchao , Du Mengran , Chen Shun , Li Jiwei , Zhang Chuanlun 
Published: March 2019

AbstractGlycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs) are ubiquitously found in marine sediments. However, their presence, distributions, and sources in the subduction zone are not fully understood. We investigated isoprenoidal GDGTs (isoGDGTs) and branched GDGTs (brGDGTs) in two sediment cores from the southern and northern subduction plates of Mariana Trench, respectively. IsoGDGTs and brGDGTs exhibited covariation in most sediment samples, and total GDGT concentrations reached a maximum at the subsurface sediment depth ~10 cm. Concentrations of isoGDGTs and brGDGTs were clearly elevated at depths of ~10 and ~45 cm. These indicated that microbial activities potentially influenced the production of the specific membrane lipids of archaea and bacteria. We found that the branched and isoprenoid tetraether index and Rb/i values increased with depth profiles of the Mariana subduction zone, suggesting that deeper sediments likely hosted more brGDGT‐producing bacteria than crenarchaeol‐producing archaea. The extremely high abundance of cyclopentyl rings in brGDGTs was determined in subsurface sediments. We further proposed that most of the brGDGTs in sediments were produced in situ in the Mariana subduction zone. This study highlights that the extremophilic microbial communities of the Mariana subduction zone may represent a significant component of the global carbon cycle.
Comment on “Exploring the Influence of Smallholders' Perceptions Regarding Water Availability on Crop Choice and Water Allocation Through Socio‐Hydrological Modeling” by Kuil et al. [Water Resource Research, 54, 2580–2604]
Authors: Zhang Ling 
Published: March 2019

AbstractA paper has recently been published in Water Resources Research, which explored the influence of smallholder's perceptions regarding water availability on crop choice and water allocation through social‐hydrological modeling. The present paper attempts to discuss and comment on that paper. The authors have developed a social‐hydrological model, behind which some assumptions of the hydrological aspects (including the omission of deep percolation and the complete separation of transpiration and evaporation for the growing season and the off season) are not well justified. Further, a few parameter values seem to be mistakenly presented by the authors. Most importantly, the equation used for calculating the irrigation depth for crop 1 was incorrectly derived, which could lead to apparent biases in the simulated soil moisture, drought memories, and crop fractions. Hence, the key findings of Kuil et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017WR021420) might be associated with large uncertainties and should be interpreted with much caution.
Deciphering the complex role of thrombospondin-1 in glioblastoma development
Authors: Daubon Thomas , Léon Céline , Clarke Kim , Andrique Laetitia , Salabert Laura , Darbo Elodie , Pineau Raphael , Guérit Sylvaine , Maitre Marlène , Dedieu Stéphane , Jeanne Albin , Bailly Sabine , Feige Jean-Jacques , Miletic Hrvoje , Rossi Marco , Bello Lorenzo , Falciani Francesco , Bjerkvig Rolf , Bikfalvi Andréas 
Published: March 2019

AbstractWe undertook a systematic study focused on the matricellular protein Thrombospondin-1 (THBS1) to uncover molecular mechanisms underlying the role of THBS1 in glioblastoma (GBM) development. THBS1 was found to be increased with glioma grades. Mechanistically, we show that the TGFβ canonical pathway transcriptionally regulates THBS1, through SMAD3 binding to the THBS1 gene promoter. THBS1 silencing inhibits tumour cell invasion and growth, alone and in combination with anti-angiogenic therapy. Specific inhibition of the THBS1/CD47 interaction using an antagonist peptide decreases cell invasion. This is confirmed by CD47 knock-down experiments. RNA sequencing of patient-derived xenograft tissue from laser capture micro-dissected peripheral and central tumour areas demonstrates that THBS1 is one of the gene with the highest connectivity at the tumour borders. All in all, these data show that TGFβ1 induces THBS1 expression via Smad3 which contributes to the invasive behaviour during GBM expansion. Furthermore, tumour cell-bound CD47 is implicated in this process.