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The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or silcrow. In other languages it may be called the "paragraph symbol".
Case citation is a system used by legal professionals to identify past court case decisions, either in series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a neutral style that identifies a decision regardless of where it is reported. Case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, but generally contain the same key information.
Personal names in German-speaking Europe consist of one or several given names and a surname. The Vorname is usually gender-specific. A name is usually cited in the "Western order" of "given name, surname". The most common exceptions are alphabetized list of surnames, e.g. "Bach, Johann Sebastian", as well as some official documents and spoken southern German dialects. In most of this, the German conventions parallel the naming conventions in most of Western and Central Europe, including English, Dutch, Italian, and French. There are some vestiges of a patronymic system as they survive in parts of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, but these do not form part of the official name.
The Federal Court of Justice is the highest court of civil and criminal jurisdiction in Germany. Its primary responsibility is the final appellate review of decisions by lower courts for errors of law. While, legally, a decision by the Federal Court of Justice is only binding with respect to the individual case in which it enters, de facto the court's interpretation of the law is followed by lower courts with almost no exception. Decisions handed down by the Federal Court of Justice can only be vacated by the Federal Constitutional Court for violating a provision of the German constitution, the Basic Law.
Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made sexual relations between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. Overall, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law. The law had always been controversial and inspired the first homosexual movement, which called for its repeal.
The German nobility and royalty were status groups of the medieval society in Central Europe, which enjoyed certain privileges relative to other people under the laws and customs in the German-speaking area, until the beginning of the 20th century. Historically, German entities that recognized or conferred nobility included the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806), the German Confederation (1814–1866) and the German Empire (1871–1918). Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the German Empire had a policy of expanding his political base by ennobling nouveau riche industrialists and businessmen who had no noble ancestors. The nobility flourished during the dramatic industrialization and urbanization of Germany after 1850. Landowners modernized their estates, and oriented their business to an international market. Many younger sons were positioned in the rapidly growing national and regional civil service bureaucracies, as well as in the officer corps of the military. They acquired not only the technical skills but the necessary education in high prestige German universities that facilitated their success. Many became political leaders of new reform organizations such as agrarian leagues, and pressure groups. The Roman Catholic nobility played a major role in forming the new Centre Party in resistance to Bismarck's anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, while Protestant nobles were similarly active in the Conservative Party.
Erwin Konrad Eduard Bumke was the last president of the Reichsgericht, the supreme civil and criminal court of the German Reich, serving from 1929 to 1945. As such, according to the Weimar Constitution, he should have become acting President of Germany upon the death of Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, and thus the acting Head of State of Nazi Germany. The Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich, passed by the Hitler cabinet, unconstitutionally prevented that by combining the presidency with the chancellorship, making Adolf Hitler the undisputed ruler of Germany.
A squeeze-out or squeezeout, sometimes synonymous with freeze-out, is the compulsory sale of the shares of minority shareholders of a joint-stock company for which they receive a fair cash compensation.
Capital punishment in Germany has been abolished for all crimes, and is now explicitly prohibited by the constitution. It was abolished in West Germany in 1949, in the Saarland in 1956, and East Germany in 1987. The last person executed in Germany was the East German Werner Teske, who was executed at Leipzig Prison in 1981.
The German Strafgesetzbuch in section § 86a outlaws use of symbols of "unconstitutional organizations" and terrorism outside the contexts of "art or science, research or teaching". The law does not name the individual symbols to be outlawed, and there is no official exhaustive list. However, the law has primarily been used to supress fascist, Nazi, communist, Islamic extremist and Russian militarist symbols. The law, adopted during the Cold War, most notably affected the Communist Party of Germany, which was banned as unconstitutional in 1956; the Socialist Reich Party, which was banned in 1952; and several small far-right parties.
The Volkswagen Act is a set of German federal laws enacted in 1960, regulating the privatization of Volkswagenwerk GmbH into the Volkswagen Group. In order to maintain government control in the privately owned company, it stipulated that the votes in major shareholder meeting resolutions require 4/5th (80%) agreement. This part of the law was deemed to violate the "free movement of capital" principle of European Union corporate law. After a series of challenges from 2007 to 2013, the German parliament finally amended the part in 2013 to EU Court of Justice satisfaction.
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Dieter Medicus was a German jurist. Until his retirement in 1994 he was professor of Private Law and history of Ancient law at the University of Munich.
Transgender rights in the Federal Republic of Germany are regulated by the Transsexuellengesetz since 1980, and indirectly affected by other laws like the Abstammungsrecht. The law initially required transgender people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery in order to have key identity documents changed. This has since been declared unconstitutional. The German government has pledged to replace the Transsexuellengesetz with the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, which would remove the financial and bureaucratic hurdles necessary for legal gender and name changes. Discrimination protections on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation vary across Germany, but discrimination in employment and the provision of goods and services is in principle banned countrywide.
Otto Heinrich Greve was a German lawyer by profession and a politician of the German Democratic Party (DDP) and its successor German State Party, the Free Democratic Party and Social Democratic Party of Germany and a member of the German Bundestag.
The Reichsoberhandelsgericht, abbreviated ROHG, was a short-lived German supreme court seated in Leipzig, which primarily dealt with appeals concerning commercial law, but later expanded its subject-matter jurisdiction. It was the first German court with local jurisdiction for all German territories since the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
The Oberappellationsgericht der vier Freien Städte, since 1867 the Oberappellationsgericht der Freien Hansestädte, seated in Lübeck was an appeals court of the German Confederation and the North German Confederation with territorial jurisdiction for Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Lübeck. Frankfurt was removed from the court's jurisdiction in 1867 after its annexation by Prussia. In 1870 the court lost its subject-matter jurisdiction for commercial law to the Reichsoberhandelsgericht and was altogether abolished in 1879.
Hermann Karl August Weinkauff was a German jurist. He served in several positions as a judge and later became the first President of the Federal Court of Justice of West Germany.
References
- For Austrian legal citation see Gerhard Friedl & Herbert Loebenstein, Abkürzungs- und Zitierregeln der österreichischen Rechtssprache und europarechtlicher Rechtsquellen (AZR), 5th ed., Manz, Vienna 2001.