On Giving
A Note of Thanks
What a week for celebrations! Monday marked 75 years of the Federal Constitutional Court, tomorrow is German Unity Day, and on Sunday brings Harvest Thanksgiving. Granted, Thanksgiving – with its faint whiff of potatoes – may seem a little out of place next to such grandeur of state. But bear with me.
Owning Gifts
Berlin isn’t only celebrating these days. It’s arguing. Ever since Die Linke came out on top in last week’s election, “Deutsche Wohnen enteignen”(expropriate Deutsche Wohnen) is back on the agenda. The debate has been in the cellar for a while too, but it deserves our full attention – not least because the federal government is eager to bin it altogether with a law banning socialisation outright.
A quick refresher: back in 2021, 57.6 per cent of Berliners, a good million people, voted in a referendum brought by the Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen campaign to bring large housing portfolios into public ownership. In March 2026, the Berlin House of Representatives finally passed a Socialisation Framework Act. Yet the act will not take effect for at least two years, and on its own, it does not socialise a single flat. Meanwhile, Berlin asking rents keep climbing to wuthering heights: they have more than doubled since 2014. So the campaign has drafted its own socialisation law and wants Berliners to vote on it. It would target private companies owning more than 3,000 flats in the city – some 220,000 units in total – which would then be transferred to a public-law entity called Gemeingut Wohnen (Housing in Common). A left-led government could now act before the referendum even takes place. That would be a historic first: Article 15 of the Basic Law has never actually been invoked. A birthday present for the Constitutional Court, perhaps?
++++++++++Advertisement++++++++++++
Call for Participation
The European Rule of Law Conference 2027, organised by re:constitution – Exchange and Analysis on Democracy and the Rule of Law in Europe on 11-12 May 2027 in Brussels, calls for submissions of proposals for parallel sessions. We specifically invite actors from across different disciplines to bring your perspective to the debates about the current status of rule of law in Europe and beyond & to contribute to its protection.
Find out more & submit your proposal until 18 Oct!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here in Germany,
lawyers love nothing more than dissecting the doctrinal intricacies of Articles 14 and 15. Today, though, let’s look at things through a coarser sieve. Property, expropriation, socialisation: all of these concepts were conjured up by legal magic. If we step back a little (or a few millennia), we can still see the land with innocent eyes: untilled ground, wilderness. Nature hands us fruit and veg without asking for Google Pay, and countries need no unification because the soil knows no borders. Well, okay, the state of nature came with its own set of problems. But such romantic time travel helps us look at the role of law with a sober mind. That is what Isabel Feichtner does in her book Bodenschätze, the German word for “mineral resources”, but literally translating to “treasures of the soil”. Through two case studies, Feichtner traces how law distributes and exploits land. One of them, you guessed it, is Deutsche Wohnen enteignen(Feichtner served on the expert commission). The other is set in Kingston, Jamaica, where Indigenous coastal communities are requesting the International Seabed Authority to halt deep-sea mining. “Law is deeply entangled in the destruction of the common”, Feichtner writes. In both cases, the question is the same: who gets the land and the riches beneath it? It’s about resources that should belong to no single person, because they were given to us all.
Seeing Gifts
I suspect Harvest Thanksgiving has fallen out of fashion because we have forgotten how to give. In German, attention is something you gift (schenken). In English, it is something you pay – and that now seems the far more fitting verb for our times, as an invisible hand auctions off our attention in tiny data packets. And even birthday presents often feel more like business transactions. We tacitly agree on a budget, shuffling it around our circle of friends as returnable goods. By the end of the year, we secretly hope to break even (while wishing we’d just picked out that woollen blanket ourselves). Everything, it seems, has been turned into an economy.
And yet, whether something is a gift purely depends on our perspective. Take the supermarket checkout. Paying €3 for an avocado from Peru doesn’t exactly fill us with deep gratitude. Quite the opposite: outrageous! Prices keep rising! And if anyone deserves thanks, surely it’s us – after all, we earned that €3 through honest work. Well. Everything we earncomes from nature. There are no alien spaceships dumping things onto us Earthlings in exchange for hard-earned money (at least none that I know of, but I’m sure Musk is working on something). Things may look less and less like Earth (take the very device on which these words are materialising right now), but there is still Earth inside them (rare earths, in this case). Seen this way, everything is a gift of nature.
That isn’t the only reason to be grateful, though. We ourselves are part of nature: we live alongside it, nurture it, farm it and exploit it – and in doing so, exploit ourselves. How many hands did that avocado pass through before reaching ours? Who planted the tree, fed and watered it, picked the fruit, shipped and stored it, and, at the end of a long shift, stacked it on the shelf? Without our noticing, every purchase connects us to people, bees and landscapes – across national borders and property lines.
++++++++++Advertisement++++++++++++
PhD Position in Administrative Sanctions | BI Norwegian Business School
The Department of Law and Governance invites applications for a four-year PhD position within the RODEAS research project, funded by the Research Council of Norway. As PhD-candidate, you will examine the legal nature of administrative sanctions situated at the intersection with criminal punishment. Based in Oslo, the role includes 25% teaching duties. Application deadline: 15 November 2026.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sharing Gifts
So how about a counter-spell? Feichtner’s uses the spell of the “commons”. The commons are not static objects, but a practice: people share a resource and set their own rules for managing it. What everyone uses belongs to no one alone. Owners turn into users, and private property becomes a common good. Abracadabra! For Feichtner, the commons and socialisation can “show ways in which people can become terrestrial again, close resource cycles and organise provision so that it does not come at the expense of other living beings and communities”. Becoming terrestrial again would be a nice exercise for the Silicon Valley aliens, either. And Berlin now has the chance to lead by example.
You may also recognise the “commons” from our own small print: we publish open access under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA licence. Ideas, too, are common goods. They connect us in an invisible network across time and space. They are gifts. And the beauty of ideas is that, unlike affordable housing, big cities don’t make them scarce. If anything, they tend to sprout wild there – much like they do here in Berlin-Neukölln. So may I use this occasion? Thank you for reading and sharing our work, for challenging us, for writing down your ideas and publishing them here, and for supporting our little gift economy with your donation. After all, ideas need fertile soil to grow, too.
*
Editor’s Pick
by JANA TRAPP
Copyright: 2021–2026 20th Television / Hulu / Disney
As a criminal lawyer, I approach TV screen murders with a strong sense of professional rigor – after years of studying I can’t help myself and roll eyes at dramatic forensic work and ludicrous investigative approaches. Turns out, there is another way: enter Only Murders in the Building. When a resident of the historic Arconia on New York’s Upper West Side turns up dead, the police write it off as suicide. Three fellow tenants smell a murder: Charles (Steve Martin), a former TV detective who is closer to his signature role than to actual people; Oliver (Martin Short), a broke Broadway director with a big ego and an even bigger coat; and Mabel (Selena Gomez), a millennial who knows exactly what she wants. Without further ado, they start their own true-crime podcast to crack the case live on air. As the trio stumbles their way through breaking-and-entering and evidence destruction, a compelling mystery unfolds, laced with fine dark comedy. A crime series for anyone who finds murder intriguing, procedural blunders forgivable, and their neighbors thoroughly suspicious
*
The Week on Verfassungsblog
summarised by EVA MARIA BREDLER
Schools in France stayed closed today, as everyone took to the streets. For days, pupils across the country have been protesting against the government’s austerity politics: railing against understaffing, badly ventilated classrooms and bleak prospects. Many teachers have since joined them, not least because of the at times brutal police response. Scenes like these are hard to imagine in Germany. Clearly, our political cultures have diverged here.
And the differences don’t stop there. France takes a different approach to resilience, too. Germany and France both shield their institutions against an authoritarian-populist takeover, but they guard against different threats, as ARNE P. WEGNER (GER) observes: ‘The Fifth Republic fears a grab for power from the top; the Basic Law fears paralysis at its many joints.”
Few people think of audit offices when they picture an authoritarian-populist takeover. Yet these are precisely the institutions that can expose the unlawful diversion of public funds. JAKOB WEICKERT (GER) shows why knowing your way around a budget makes a democracy more resilient.
Knowing what is in people’s individual household budgets, on the other hand, can make a democracy less resilient. Schufa, Germany’s leading credit agency, holds data on 68 million people and rates their creditworthiness in a process that is hard to see through. RUTH JANAL (GER) analyses how a pending judgment by the Federal Court of Justice could shed some light on it.
Saxony seems to be relying on opacity as well. While politicians in Saxony-Anhalt are calling for separate classes for refugee children, Saxony is quietly creating special rules for unaccompanied minors through administrative regulations, which it now wants to make permanent. But child and youth welfare law prohibits discriminating against young refugees, as HANNAH FRANKE, SALOMON GEHRING and ULRIKE VON WÖLFEL (GER) explain.
++++++++++Advertisement++++++++++++
Autoritäre Populist*innen mit staatlichen Machtmitteln, gar in einer Landesregierung?
Dieses Szenario könnte nach den Landtagswahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Realität werden und bereitet vielen Menschen vor Ort, in der ganzen Republik und darüber hinaus berechtigte Sorgen.
Was kommt da auf uns zu?
Der Verfassungsblog bündelt dazu Expert:innenwissen, damit es parat steht, wenn es gebraucht wird. Lesen Sie hier die Beiträge in unserem Spotlight.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Italy is going a step further. Giorgia Meloni has announced a 30 per cent cap on foreign pupils per class. PIETRO FARAGUNA (ENG) sees a lesson on the shortcomings of Italian citizenship law and questions what Meloni is really after.
Questionable motives were also behind a European Citizens’ Initiative. With their “Save Europe Act”, far-right populists wanted to “take the message of remigration to Brussels”. The European Commission has refused to register the initiative because it violates the values set out in Article 2 TEU – a historic first. FÉLICIE REMLINGER (ENG) explains why enforcing EU values is not always as clear-cut as it was here.
This time, the EU acted to save itself from the “Save Europe Act”. If it ever fails to do so, let’s hope we discover our inner French.
That’s it for this week. Take care and all the best!
Yours,
the Verfassungsblog Team
If you would like to receive the weekly editorial as an e-mail, you can subscribe here.