Looking Beyond the National Constitution – The Growing Role of Contemporary International Constitutional Law. Reflections on the First Vienna Workshop on International Constitutional Law

Abstract

In a world of societies ever more closely interrelating to each other, lawyers face the challenge of crossing the borders of their national legal system and looking beyond its fundamental source of identity – the constitution. Having this thought in mind, Harald Eberhard, Konrad Lachmayer and Gerhard Thallinger organized the First Vienna Workshop on International Constitutional Law held on 20 and 21 May 2005, bringing together members of the academic community, legal officers in International Organizations and law students. The Workshop offered eight lectures and fruitful discussions on the comparative analysis of constitutional law thus providing a new impetus to a field of law of steadily growing importance to which, so far, too little attention has been given.

The harmonisation of private law in Europe and children's tort liability: A case of fundamental and children's rights mainstreaming

“…The future of harmonisation of European private law seems, at least for the time being, to be better off relying on the slow building of a European legal scholarship, based, for example, on courses of European private law and on the comparative work produced by national legislatures and courts, rather than on grand European legislative projects (Smits, 2004: paras. 47 ff;Bauer andMikulaschek, 2005: 1110-15;Wagner, 2006;Schepel, 2007). Accordingly, the harmonisation of private legal norms with an impact on children's rights and interests needs, for now, to settle for comparative child law courses, international conferences on children's rights, scholarly research on the impact of EU policy on children, and raising the awareness of national legislatures of the law applicable to children in other EU member states.…”