Update: “Restitution at Any Price” – A Critique of the Hans Sachs Judgment

Last week, I posted on a rather fundamental critique of the Federal Supreme Court in the Hans Sachs Restitution matter published in Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ). The article has now been made available in their free online offering. The illustration to the article is not one of the posters from the Hans Sachs Collection, but a work of Greser & Lenz, the FAZ cartoonists from Aschaffenburg, my home town.

 

Arbitrator’s Nightmare: When Procedural Orders Backfire – Flex-n-Gate v. GEA

It must be an arbitrator’s nightmare: Imagine a high-stake arbitration that goes on for years, the entire distance, including witness hearings and expert evidence, only for the final award to be set aside on procedural grounds. And this is exactly what the Frankfurt Court of Appeals (Oberlandesgericht) Frankfurt did in a judgment in February 2011, which has now become full and final. For a detailed discussion the case, see my post at the Kluwer Arbitration Blog.

Lost in Translation: Deutsche Bank vs. Kirch

In its current edition, The Economist covered the topic of cross-border legal services and the need for legal translations. But as a German case recently illustrated, in a globalised world, you can get lost in translation even in litigation that, at least on paper, is purely domestic. In the long drawn litigation saga between Deutsche Bank and the heirs of media tycoon Leo Kirch which is pending in the Munich courts, the judges have to resort to expert evidence from linguists in order to sort out what the minutes of board meetings of Deutsche Bank really meant. – According to today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine, things do not look good for Deutsche Bank. Continue reading

“Restitution at Any Price” – A Critique of the Hans Sachs Judgment

In March 2012, the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) found in favour of the heir of Jewish art collector Hans Sachs in a restitution case. In my view it created a new precedent for restitution claims for a large class of lost art. The authors of an op-ed piece in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung agree, and heavily criticize the judgment of the Federal Supreme Court precisely for that reason – they call it “a wrongly decided and dangerous judgment”.

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