You read it here first – Germany’s position on the discovery of documents may be softening. My first post on the topic was triggered by a May 2013 decision of the Frankfurt Court of Appeals, setting aside a surprising decision by the Central Authority for the State of Hesse. It came with a question mark: Is Germany’s position softening? But now, the Federal Ministry of Justice (Bundesjustizministerium) is reconsidering Germany’s position.
Jogi Löw has named his squad for the World Cup in Brazil. And while the German players will be sweating in their training camp, University of Heidelberg, the German Institution of Arbitration (DIS) and DAV’s Sports Law Section are running a joint training camp of their own for lawyers to get them ready for the World Cup.
A one day conference on June 6, 2014, looks at the World Cup from various legal angles, primarily – but not exclusively – from an arbitration perspective. One session sounds particularly exiting: It brings together counsel for both parties in the Pechstein case, in which the District Court (Landgericht) München has recently issued a controversial judgment on the role of arbitration in sport, when it held an arbitration clause used by a sports in an athlete’s agreement federations to be invalid.
This judgment, by the Administrative Court of Appeal (Oberverwaltungs-gericht) in Magdeburg, State of Sachsen-Anhalt, is unrelated to the Gurlitt matter, courtesy of which the Lost Art database has gained unprecedented name recognition worldwide. The court had to rule on the issue whether a work of art has to be removed from the database, once it has been found, even if the title to the art work remains disputed. Continue reading
This court decision is part of an on-going litigation battle between the shareholders of Suhrkamp Verlag, one of Germany’s best known publishing houses, with authors such as Hermann Hesse, Samuel Beckett, Octavio Paz, James Joyce, Peter Handke, Jürgen Habermas or Uwe Johnson to its name, to name just a random few.