This paper examines whether the affiliation of a dysfunctional municipality with a neighboring municipality under Section 2aa of Slovakia’s Act No. 369/1990 Coll. offers an effective and constitutionally defensible response to the prolonged absence of elected municipal bodies. It distinguishes statutory dysfunctionality from other forms of institutional weakness and evaluates the mechanism against criteria of legal operability, procedural predictability, democratic legitimacy, proportionality and financial sustainability. A legal–dogmatic analysis is combined with a documentary case study of Ondavka, where municipal bodies were restored in October 2020 before affiliation was completed. The case documents the limits of implementation but does not establish that the threat of affiliation caused electoral mobilization. The article argues that Section 2aa closes a narrow legal gap without resolving wider problems of administrative fragmentation. It recommends binding procedural deadlines, meaningful consultation, a prior assessment of inherited liabilities, predictable financial support and a carefully delimited temporary alternative to dissolution.
This article provides a perspective from the United States (US) on the crisis facing the World Trade Organization. The author argues that there is a political consensus in the US that the current multilateral trade order is broken, but there is no consensus on what should replace it. This lack of affirmative political consensus, combined with a lack of rigorous legal restraint on presidential trade authority, constrains the country’s ability to play a constructive role in reforming the Organization that it views as fundamentally broken.
From 14 December 2027, Regulation (EU) 2024/3015 will prohibit the Union-market placement and export of products made with forced labour, without imposing an autonomous ex ante duty to generate product-specific labour records. Drawing on Korean primary legal sources, this article provides an ex ante doctrinal assessment of the Regulation and the Commission’s 2026 Guidelines. It distinguishes provenance—documenting a product’s production and supply path—from attribution—linking a production condition to that product. First, as narrowed in 2026, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive is less plausible as an existing alternative making an equivalent contribution under Article XX(a) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994. Second, Article 20(5) of the Regulation, by permitting withholding rather than disposal in strategic supply chains, could translate product-level differentiation into country-level discrimination; a necessity defence of disposal makes that relaxation harder to justify under the chapeau. Third, Korean fishery provenance records reach consignment level, whereas statutory and official labour-related records do not systematically do so. Missing records may therefore reflect the domestic record-generation architecture or limited operator control rather than non-cooperation, a distinction the Regulation and Guidelines do not expressly resolve. Market access may thus turn on factors external to production conditions.
This article examines how deficiencies in data used by artificial intelligence systems become legally relevant and how the resulting harm is allocated across a multi-actor chain. This study combines doctrinal analysis, functional comparison, a targeted narrative review, and normative modelling; its creditworthiness scenario is hypothetical. Ten analytical categories are grouped into data quality, legal origin, and governance/evidential defects and linked to legal and technical sources. Kazakhstan’s civil and procedural law is compared with bounded European Union mechanisms and Korean civil and personal information legislation. The analysis identifies existing rules on presumed fault, evidence production, obstruction of expert examination, and joint causation before defining residual gaps. The proposed model preserves ordinary remedies, develops purpose-specific warranties and protected disclosure, and confines additional presumptions to specified records and causal issues. Exceptional operator liability without proof of fault requires express legislative designation and justification of residual risk beyond existing remedies. Joint and several liability depends on joint causation, not technical participation or missing documentation alone. The key contribution of the study is a domestically grounded coordination model that distinguishes existing law, interpretation, and legislative proposals without treating every inaccurate outcome as compensable harm.
Regulating digital platforms requires choices about the protection of dependent business users, the control of platform conduct, and the institutions responsible for enforcement. These choices shape the relationship between statutory regulation and conventional antitrust. This article examines Türkiye’s 2022 electronic commerce reform through doctrinal analysis and systematic coding of provisions by their distinct legal effects. The analysis traces the distribution of protection, obligations, regulatory techniques, and administrative authority. The reform adds explicit safeguards for marketplace sellers while retaining the original buyer protections. Its coverage and conduct duties rely on statutory categories and quantitative conditions rather than individualized findings of dominance or competitive harm. Rules govern coverage and most conduct duties. Within the conduct provisions, sales-linked and budget-linked penalties attach to rule-coded duties rather than fairness standards. Functional mapping distinguishes core competition-related analogues from broader, more contestable similarities. Administrative competition law by proxy describes this combination of competition-related duties, rule-based coverage, and ministerial supervision. The findings identify questions of proportionality, proxy accuracy, and institutional coordination. They concern statutory design rather than the reform’s competitive effects.
