Blockchain Papers

Elie Bouri, Naji Jalkh, Péter Molnár, David Roubaud

We study the relationship between Bitcoin and commodities by assessing the ability of Bitcoin to act as a diversifier, hedge, or safe haven against daily movements in commodities in general, and energy commodities in particular. We focus on energy commodities because energy, in the form of electricity, is an essential input in the Bitcoin production. For the entire period, results show that Bitcoin is a strong hedge and a safe-haven against movements in both commodity indices. We further examine whether that ability is also present for non-energy commodities and our analysis show insignificant results when energy commodities are excluded from the general commodity index. We also account for the December 2013 Bitcoin price crash and our results reveal that Bitcoin hedge and safe-haven properties against commodities and energy commodities are only present in the pre-crash period, whereas in the post-crash period Bitcoin is no more than a diversifier. In addition to uncovering the time-varying role of Bitcoin, we highlight the dissimilarity in the dynamic correlations between the extreme downward and extreme upward movements.

Jeremy Peat, Owen Kelly, Daniel Broby

Fintech is a term given to financial technology in the digital age. At its core sit the twin concepts of blockchain and distributed ledgers. These technology solutions bring with them the promise of faster, cheaper, more secure and transparent financial transactions over the internet. In a more widely used context, Fintech is conceived and even defined as enabling disruptive innovation in financial markets and financial services. This briefing explains what Fintech is and investigates whether the promise of Fintech is hype or reality. It also highlights the resultant policy implications that are generated by the phenomena and what issues lawmakers should be cognisant of.

Frédéric Le Mouël, Carlos Barrios-Hernandez, Oscar Carrillo, Gabriel Pedraza

The globalization of trade and the organization of work are currently causing a large migratory flow towards the cities. This growth of cities requires new urban planning where digital tools take a preponderant place to capture data and understand and decide in face of changes. These tools however hardly resist to natural disasters, terrorism, accidents, etc. Based on the expertise of the CITI laboratory of INSA Lyon and SC3 of the Industrial University of Santander, we propose to create the ALERT project - Autonomous Liable Emergency service in Real Time - with decentralized, reliable and efficient services, physically close to the citizens, taking decisions locally, in a relevant manner without risk of disconnection with a central authority. These information gathering and decision-making will involve the population with participatory and social approaches.

Masaaki Matsubara, Kiyoko F. Aoki‐Kinoshita, Nobuyuki P. Aoki, Issaku Yamada · 5 authors

Accurate representation of structural ambiguity is important for storing carbohydrate structures containing varying levels of ambiguity in the literature and databases. Although many representations for carbohydrates have been developed in the past, a generalized but discrete representation format did not exist. We had previously developed the Web3 Unique Representation of Carbohydrate Structures (WURCS) in an attempt to define a generalizable and unique linear representation for carbohydrate structures. However, it lacked sufficient rules to uniquely describe ambiguous structures. In this work, we updated WURCS to handle such ambiguous monosaccharide structures. In particular, to handle structural ambiguity around (potential) carbonyl groups incidental to the carbohydrate analysis, we defined a representation of backbone carbons containing atomic-level ambiguity. As a result, we show that WURCS 2.0 can represent a wider variety of carbohydrate structures containing ambiguous monosaccharides, such as those whose ring closure is undefined or whose anomeric information is only known. This new format provides a representation of carbohydrates that was not possible before, and it is currently being used by the International Glycan Structure Repository GlyTouCan.

Alexander Lipton

We introduce blockchains and distributed ledgers and describe their potential applications to money and banking. The analysis compares public and private ledgers and outlines the suitability of various types of ledgers for different purposes. Furthermore, a few historical prototypes of blockchains and distributed ledgers are presented, and results of their hard forking are illustrated. Next, some potential applications of distributed ledgers to trading, clearing and settlement, payments, trade finance, etc. are outlined. Monetary circuits are argued to be natural applications for blockchains. Finally, the role of digital currencies in modern society is articulated and various forms of digital cash, such as central bank issued electronic cash, bank money, bitcoin and P2P money, are compared and contrasted. Keywords: blockchains, distributed ledgers, digital currencies, modern monetary circuit; credit creation banking; interconnected banking network.

Tom Olavi Bangemann

Alternatively, shared services can be looked upon as a combination of decentral- ization and centralization. An SSO combines the best of both worlds. It utilizes economies of scale from centralized approaches. It also recognizes local needs and leaves most decision power and control in the business units. Thereby an SSO actually supports a decentralized approach by freeing up local resources to concentrate on core operational activities. An SSO provides the platform to leverage economies of scale and to combine the critical mass of skills. Smaller local units often have a problem in attracting high potentials or sufficiently qualified finance resources. A professional SSO offers a finance environment that helps attract competent finance staff and thereby reduces risk and enhances quality.

John H Cochrane

Abstract Macro-finance addresses the link between asset prices and economic fluctuations. Many models reflect the same rough idea: the market’s ability to bear risk is greater in good times, and less in bad times. Models achieve this similar result by quite different mechanisms. I contrast their strengths and weaknesses. I highlight directions for future research, including additional facts to be matched, and limitations of the models that should prod future theoretical work. I describe how macro-finance models can fundamentally alter macroeconomics, by putting time-varying risk premiums and risk-bearing capacity at the center of recessions rather than variation in the interest rate and intertemporal substitution.

Ulrich Petschow

In zunehmendem Maße wird das Finanzsystem von digitalen Technologien beeinflusst. Welche Potenziale bringen diese neuen Technologien für das Geld- und Austauschsystem mit sich? Und wie können diese für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung eingesetzt werden?

Ning Zhou, Menghan Wu, Jianxin Zhou

In recent years, volunteer service in China has made an unprecedented development, but the credibility and traceability of volunteer service time management are confronted with serious challenges. Since traditional time record systems cannot protect the related data security of the volunteers. In this paper, we study the volunteer time record system based on the blockchain technology which is the core technology of bitcoin, unlike bitcoin transaction in our system are not strictly financial - they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying, and sharing data. Volunteer service time and activity information recorded by sending the chain transaction. Effective time recognition is guaranteed by smart contract. It can ensure that the volunteer's time is independent of improper human interference, and the fairness of volunteer service, realizes the traceability and transparency of the entire time record process. Then we describe a specific case and use the system we proposed storing the volunteer service time, volunteers' service time can be certified effectively.

Maryam Mohammed Aldarwish, Hafiz Farooq Ahmad

No abstract is available for this record.

Prinesha Naidoo

No abstract is available for this record.

Olga Gouveia, Enestor Dos Santos, Santiago Fernández de Lis, Alejandro Neut · 5 authors

Los libros contables distribuidos (distributed ledgers, en ingles) constituyen una tecnología que permite una version digitalizada del dinero en efectivo al tiempo que potencialmente mantiene sus cuatro características principales: la universalidad, el anonimato, la intercambiabilidad entre pares (P2P) y un valor nominal constante.

Debra Caplan

Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders opens with two brief stories that, in the hands of another writer, might be mere anecdotes: Fiddler on the Roof’s near-simultaneous invocation in 2011 by political radio talk show host Glenn Beck and Jewish protestors involved with Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, the entire introduction, aptly named “A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” seems at first to dwell on the anecdotal. Before we come to the evolution of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, we are first introduced to kids singing “Sabbath Prayer” at summer camps, interfaith holiday greeting cards featuring Tevye, Augusto Pinochet’s banning of Fiddler in Chile in the mid-1970s, and references to Fiddler in The Simpsons. But, like the modest yet treasured possessions of the residents of Anatevka, there’s a lot more to these little bits then meets the eye. By page 2, Solomon has already essentially proven her central argument—that “Fiddler, like no other musical before or since, has seeped into the culture more widely, functioning in sometimes contradictory ways” (2) as a signifier of various kinds and degrees of Jewishness, a measure of political affiliation, and a mode of Jewish ritual practice, among others. Indeed, Wonder of Wonders tells the story of Fiddler on the Roof’s evolution and cultural impact with an astonishing breadth that is itself proof positive for her argument.The juxtaposition of Glenn Beck and Occupy at the start of the book is no mere anecdote, but a hint of what’s to come. For this book is not only about how Fiddler on the Roof came into being and its reception, though Solomon does provide a fresh take on that subject. But more than anything else, this is a book about the musical’s “radiant afterlife” as a global cultural phenomenon with “surprising, enduring, shape-shifting utility” (4). It is this shape-shifting quality that Solomon traces most closely, following the trail of each new permutation of Sholem-Aleichem’s original Tevye stories like a magician demonstrating how a simple scarf can change color and texture, become a bird, vanish into thin air, and then suddenly reappear. In Wonder of Wonders, we catch a glimpse of how this beloved, shape-shifting Broadway musical has become part of the world’s cultural ether, ever ready to meet the changing needs of its audiences.Time and time again, as Solomon demonstrates, Fiddler has morphed anew across a wide range of cultural contexts and locales. From the readers who first loved Tevye in Eastern Europe to the middle schoolers in a controversial Brownsville student production of Fiddler in 1968, from young Poles’ attempts to understand their country’s past via musical theater to Jewish parents hiring bottle dancers for bar and bat mitzvahs, from Sholem-Aleichem’s years of struggle to bring his work to the Yiddish stage to the Fiddler-themed Judaica and dishware that can be found in synagogue gift shops across the country, Solomon examines it all. In the hands of another writer, these might have been rendered picayune episodes, nothing more than footnotes to the “real” story of the Broadway musical. Not so in Wonder of Wonders. Instead, these examples illuminate Fiddler’s remarkable staying power as something more than just a play with many productions: a cultural touchstone.In Solomon’s capable hands, we readers are thus presented with dozens of incarnations of Tevye’s story as it is told and retold, deconstructed, reconfigured, and revived over the course of more than a century. Many fine books and articles have been written about Fiddler on the Roof, of course, but no one before Solomon has ever examined Fiddler as a cultural phenomenon with such comprehensive scope. Encompassing not only the expected topics (Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Jerome Robbins’s feud with Zero Mostel, the casting for the film) but also subjects that have never before been considered vis-à-vis their relationship to Fiddler (Hebrew theater in the forties, black-Jewish relations in the sixties, Fiddler’s impact on contemporary Jewish rituals), this is cultural history at its finest.Like the writers and artists who are her subjects, Solomon knows how to create dramatic tension. The single word that readers are most likely to automatically associate with Fiddler on the Roof (and the title of the show’s signature opening number, “Tradition!”), doesn’t appear in Wonder of Wonders until well over a hundred pages in, when Jerome Robbins finally realizes what his show is actually about. Solomon thus enables her readers to develop a fresh view of Fiddler on the Roof, one that builds and grows over the course of the book. When Jerome Robbins has his “aha” moment and realizes that tradition is the heart of the show, we experience the rush of enthusiasm and recognition that must have filled the room along with the creative team. Indeed, a full half of the book covers events that happened before Fiddler even opened on Broadway. By the time we arrive at opening night, the reader has the sense of only just understanding this iconic musical for the first time.Wonder of Wonders is structured in three parts, arranged chronologically. The first set of chapters considers the Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem and his authorship of the Tevye stories, his failure to break into the Yiddish theater, and the subsequent work of translators, writers, and artists who garnered visibility for this work among English speakers (Maurice Samuel, Arnold Perl, Frances Butwin, and others). Part 2, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” examines the long process via which Fiddler came to Broadway and its initial reception. But it is part 3, “Tevye’s Travels,” that represents the most significant contribution of this book: Solomon’s careful tracing of how Fiddler on the Roof has, to an extent unique among Broadway musicals, thoroughly permeated the cultural landscape with a broad global audience that includes Jews and non-Jews, and theatergoers and non-theatergoers, within its reach.Solomon displays many talents in these pages: careful researcher, astute scholar, skilled cultural critic. But above all, it is Solomon’s power as a storyteller that is on fullest display. In clever, witty, memorable prose, Solomon introduces us to a vivid cast of characters who at times seem to almost burst forth from the page. On Jerome Robbins’s goals for Fiddler: “[he] labored mightily to burn away the schmaltz that for two decades had encased the world of the shtetl like amber.” (119) Or on Zero Mostel’s relationship to his mother tongue: “Yiddish never stopped gurgling within him; often it spilled out.” (154). Or, about the rivalry between the two men: “If a time machine could put a story about them on the Yiddish stage of earlier decades, charismatic, outsize Thomashefsky would have to play Mostel and haughty, blazing Jacob Adler would embody Robbins” (151). Solomon’s description of the Yiddish theater rivals in chapter 1 is so vivid that she can continue to reference them throughout the book.Indeed, Wonder of Wonders offers the reader a refreshingly rich and nuanced overview of Yiddish literature and the history of the Yiddish stage interwoven with a century of Tevye’s journeys. The triumph of this book lies in Solomon’s exacting insistence on telling the whole story of Fiddler on the Roof, leaving no stone unturned. To entice the wary reader who may not consider him- or herself interested in such details as the state of Yiddish publishing in the nineteenth century or the history of translations of Sholem-Aleichem, Wonder of Wonders explains the significance of these contextual pieces through superb historical storytelling that makes the fluid and multifaceted relationship between the turn-of-the-century explosion of modern Yiddish culture and Fiddler transparent. Fiddler, in other words, didn’t emerge in a vacuum; and Solomon wants to make sure that the reader understands the cultural landscape that birthed Tevye’s story. Not only does Wonder of Wonders provide a rich mini-history of Yiddish literature, but Solomon also leverages Yiddish sources to demonstrate how Yiddish culture influenced the production itself. For instance, she explores Boris Aronson and Jerome Robbins’s involvement with Yiddish theater prior to their Broadway careers, and analyzes how their experiences might have influenced particular production choices (like Robbins drawing upon his experience acting in Di brider ashkenazi at Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater for Fiddler’s wedding scene). Solomon also examines the response to Fiddler in the Yiddish press, which has never before been examined, when considering the Jewish community’s reaction to the musical. This is, to my knowledge, the first time in musical theater scholarship that a direct, continuous relationship between the Yiddish theater and Fiddler has been suggested, and it is a significant contribution. Solomon is implicitly proposing—quite rightly, I believe—that Fiddler represents a moment of sharp continuity between the Yiddish stage and Broadway, in which American Jewish theater artists drew directly upon what they had learned early in their careers in the Yiddish theater. This perspective is far too often overlooked, and is a much needed corrective to scholarship that assumes that Yiddish culture was already long gone in postwar America.In sum, Alisa Solomon has written a brilliant, eminently readable, remarkable gem of a book that is so delightful to read that one has the sense of guzzling down her prose, all 448 pages of it. Upon finishing the introduction, my first thought was, “I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.” My second thought was, “I can’t wait to have my students read this book.” This is no small feat for a hefty, meticulously researched scholarly book, steeped in years of archival research. And yet—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—Solomon pulls it off, this fusion of sophisticated academic argumentation with all of the literary qualities of a page-turner in a manner so seamless that it is nothing short of miraculous.

Pascal Lafourcade, Jean‐Guillaume Dumas

International audience

Michael Mainelli

“Who are you?” may well be the world’s most frequently asked question. On a website, in a nightclub, at an airport, or in front of a bank counter, everyone wants us to prove that we are who we say we are.

Laurie Butgereit, Chris Martinus

Throughout history, currencies or money have three different uses: means of exchange, unit of accounting, and store of wealth. People have used different types of currencies at different times throughout history. Commodity currencies represented items which are either mined from the Earth or produced by agriculture such as gold or salt. Fiat currencies are created by decree by a sovereign nation or groups of nations. Complementary currencies have been created by much smaller groups of people to solve problems which cannot be solved by commodity currencies or fiat currencies. For example, in times of economic depression when people attempt to hoard money (store wealth) there is often not enough currency to accommodate a means of exchange. With the advent of blockchains and crypto-currencies, it is now possible to easily create complementary currencies to attempt to solve problems which can not be solved using commodity currencies or fiat currencies. This paper discusses and compares two different architectures which are being used in two independent projects in South Africa to create complementary currencies by using the Ethereum blockchain and crypto-currency in order to encourage corporate excellence. It is important to note that this paper is not about the underlying success or failure of the complementary currencies created by the architectures. The paper is about the architectures themselves.

Nomxolisi Nobukhosi Okojie

ENGLISH SUMMARY : Procurement has been designed to redress some of the imbalances of the past; however, this policy instrument is being abused in some institutions around the country. This abuse has caught the eye of the Minister of Finance who, a few years ago, appointed a Chief Procurement Officer (CPO). This office of the CPO is within the National Treasury and it is tasked with ensuring that procurement, currently known as supply chain management (SCM), is properly managed. One of the causes of deficiency within the SCM environment is decentralisation. This is a method used by various institutions, including Parliament. Decentralisation means that every office is able to procure its own goods and services. This may result in procedures not being followed properly because the people who are trained in procurement or SCM reside in the SCM office. When procedures are not followed properly, this may result in awards of bids being made incorrectly, leading to irregular expenditure and possibly qualified audit opinions. The National Treasury has established a central database for all suppliers. This may curb some of the inconsistencies currently experienced; however, each institution still procures its own goods and services. In the case of Parliament, the database is not being used yet and with programmes in place that take Parliament to the rural areas, the central database may not be efficient. This study aims to give recommendations to ensure the SCM Section is able to support Parliament in meeting its strategic objectives. The study takes into consideration the unique status of Parliament as a People's Parliament and as such it needs to put people at the centre of its operations. This study also wishes to show that as much as the SCM environment is decentralised in Parliament with the necessary controls in place, there has been an improvement in ensuring that the SCM unit is able to play its strategic support role without compromise.

Masayuki Fukumitsu, Shingo Hasegawa, Junya Iwazaki, Masao Sakai · 5 authors

We propose a new secure online storage scheme based on an open P2P network without a central server. In the proposed scheme, attackers cannot detect target user data in the online storage because the user data is divided into some parts by the secret sharing, and they are distributed to P2P nodes via the anonymous communication. The proposed scheme can prevent the direct attack on the target user node because metadata for the reconstruction also hidden in the online storage, hence nothing remains in the user node. Even if the state of the P2P network varies over time between the storing and restoring operation, the proposed scheme ensures that the user can identify the target nodes which stored his metadata by utilizing the Blockchain technology with only memorable secure information for user authentication. Furthermore, a malicious node to attack on others can be detected and ruled out by the mutual monitoring among the nodes and the majority decision rule.

Shenglong Dong, Suohang Duan, Qing Yang, Jinlong Zhang · 6 authors

Utilities have traditionally employed or contracted meter readers to collect natural gas usage data, which is expensive and time consuming, and thus necessitates the need of smart natural gas metering. Existing gas metering systems mainly focus on measuring the amount of gas flowing through an microelectro mechanical system (MEMS) thermal gas flow sensor and simply ignore the detailed gas composition. From computational fluid mechanics simulations, however, we discover that gases with different compositions will cause different effects on the reading of an MEMS sensor. Based on a thorough analysis of the working principle of MEMS thermal gas flow sensor, we propose an innovative mechanism to compensate the errors caused by different types of natural gases on the sensor's reading. The proposed solution first measures the physical property of metered gas to derive the composition correction coefficient that will then be used to correct the meter's reading errors, considering the relation between the calorific value and physical property of natural gases. In this way, the proposed solution realizes a real-time multicomposition gas metering via thermal gas flow sensors. We implement and evaluate the proposed gas metering technique in various Internet of Things systems, including industrial flow metering, gas metering in smart home, and gas metering in low-power wide-area networks. Experiment results verify the innovative design and confirm that the proposed solution features high sensitivity, high precision, and high range ratio.

M. Suguna, R. Anusia, S. Mercy Shalinie, S. Renu Deepti

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a platform that allows mobile users to offload the computationally rigorous and storage demanding tasks on available cloud resources using wireless access. The major concern with MCC is the privacy of data. Mobile users give confidential information through the network, that if not safeguarded may lead to security issues. Identity Management (IDM) is the management of user identities, their authentication, and authorization in the cloud environment. The existing Consolidated Identity Management (CIDM) overcomes the network traffic interception in the traditional IDM but is prone to Identity theft in case of Identity Management Server (IDMS) compromise. This work is focused on the development of a Secure Identity Management (SIDM) that alleviates the attacks in the CIDM by using techniques that strengthens the authentication process and identity privacy. A secure IDM is developed using two-step authentication process which involves Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and token verification. The proposed SIDM model reduces the consequences of Identity server compromise attack. There is a marginal increase in the communication overhead of SIDM compared to that of CIDM but it can be compromised to realize the benefits of identity privacy. The analysis of the experimental results shows that there is an overall increase of thirty percent in communication overhead when compared to CIDM.

María Augusta Jácome León, Carla Estefanía Jácome Montenegro

The organizational climate in the public institutions like the Autonomous Decentralized Government of Pujili canton, it has taken a great importance, because it seeks to determine if there is an incidence of this in the labor performance of each one of those who make up this institution, being that it is closely linked with the motivational factors in their work environment. The objective of the research is to determine if there is an incidence between the organizational climate and the work performance of the employees, for which they were analyzed some dimensions such as; internal communication, recognition, interpersonal relationships at work, decision making, commitment, adaptation to change and the physical environment that are fundamental pillars for the institutions that provide services. The research method to be applied will be from the non-exploratory quantitative research approach, descriptive cross-sectional that was used in the survey technique and whose instrument was the measurement of the organizational weather of the authors Chiang, Nunez and Salazar; In addition, we worked with the evaluation of work performance with indicators that measure their performance in the work, this one was qualified by the director of human talent where the collected data were tabulated in the SPSS statistical software. The target population was 78 public servants of indefinite contract. The result obtained from this study is a Pearson correlation coefficient r of -0.053 which is considered as a null relation, this means that the variables of organizational weather and work performance don´t related of directly and indirectly manner. The research generated in the pujili GAD a technical impact from this will have an instrument that allows you to take into consideration the organizational climate and a social impact that it can be visualized between users and servers. The research generated in the Pujili GAD a technical impact from the present will have an instrument that allows it to take into consideration the organizational climate and a social impact that can be visualized between servers and users.

Xavier Bultel, Jannik Dreier, Pascal Lafourcade, Malika More

At the main cryptography conference, CRYPTO, in 1989, Quisquater and colleagues published a paper showing how to explain the complex notion of zero-knowledge proof in a simpler way that children can understand. In the same line of work, this article presents simple and intuitive explanations of various modern security concepts and technologies, including symmetric encryption, public key encryption, homomorphic encryption, intruder models (CPA, CCA1, CCA2), and security properties (OW, IND, NM). The explanations given in this article may also serve in demystifying such complex security notions for non-expert adults.

Robert S. Stone

Previous articleNext article FreeAutos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish SicilyRobert S. StoneRobert S. StoneUS Naval Academy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTambién, vemos que las imágines cristianas no sólo miran a Dios, mas a nosotros y al próximo.1(Francisco Pacheco, 1649)In a recent essay on Africans in Renaissance Europe, Kate Lowe notes that “the first black European saint, San Benedetto (St. Benedict, known as ‘il moro’ or the Moor), lived in Sicily in the sixteenth century, although he was not canonized until 1807.”2 He is seen here in an eighteenth-century Spanish sculpture (fig. 1). Several versions of his life (1526–89) are to be found, ranging from a hagiographical sketch by Antonio Daza in 1611,3 to Antonino de Randazzo’s longer Italian account of 1623,4 to another short life by the Jesuit Sandoval in his 1627 treatise on slavery.5 Soon after the saint’s beatification in 1747, Joaquín Benegasi’s narrative poem was published,6 and on the two-hundredth anniversary of his canonization, in 2007, a booklet was published for pilgrims to the Santa María di Gesú monastery in Palermo where Benito, as the Spanish called him, entered as a lay brother to work in the kitchen and eventually, despite his illiteracy, was chosen to become the superior.7Figure 1. Anonymous, San Benito de Palermo, 1700–1725. No. Inv: CE0570. (© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.)The trajectory of Benito’s life is quasi-picaresque. Born in Sicily to converted Ethiopian slaves, this mendicant Franciscan friar was forced by papal decree to abandon the wandering life and join a cloistered order in which he thrived by virtue of his pious humility, intelligence, and character. It is not hard to see why he was fervently embraced by the Spanish crown as a model for the conversion of slaves, freedmen, and indigenes throughout the empire: “he represented the ideal, illiterate slave (Daza calls him a ‘santo idiota’), a docile and loyal laborer, pastor, and cook.”8 Today, churches dedicated to St. Benedict the Moor are found throughout the Americas and in the Philippines, with the greatest number by far in Brazil.In selecting Benito as a subject for Spanish comedias, the well-known Golden Age playwrights Lope de Vega and Luis Vélez de Guevara exploited his popularity in both high and mass culture. Furthermore, both dramatists had indirect contact with Sicily. Three of Lope’s patrons were either viceroys or sons of viceroys of the Two Sicilies;9 Vélez de Guevara, meanwhile, took part as a young soldier in turn-of-the-century campaigns in Savoy, Milan, and Naples. It is likely, therefore, that these authors knew something of Sicilian society under Spanish rule and that this awareness found its way into their plays, as will be argued below.A century ago, Benedetto Croce noted a lack of historical and literary studies on relations between Spain and Italy, a gap that remains today, although it is narrowing.10 In the pages of this journal, for example, Edward Muir surveyed contemporary Italian Renaissance scholarship and found its focus shifting forward from the fifteenth to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and southward from Florence toward the Mezzogiorno, stopping short of Sicily, however, with Peter Mazur’s New Christians of Spanish Naples.11 In modern Sicily there is a tendency to downplay the years of Spanish dominion by the Habsburgs and their Bourbon successors in favor of a more remote, more easily romanticized heritage of Hohenstaufen, Norman, Arab, Byzantine, Roman, and Greek rulers. This is an understandable and persistent postcolonial attitude—after all, rancor against the half-Spanish king Ferdinand II was a driving force behind Garibaldi’s revolt launched from Sicily in 1860. I will try to address the Sicilian-Spanish literary lacuna by viewing history through the prism of two seventeenth-century comedias de santo set in Palermo, Lope de Vega’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (ca. 1607) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El negro del serafín (ca. 1643). Cognizant of Terry Eagleton’s formulation that one purpose of “fictionalizing history is to reconfigure the facts in order to throw into relief their underlying significance,” I will juxtapose situations in the dramas with aspects of Sicily’s sociohistorical reality at the time of their production.12In Sicily, the dominant institution of the age was the Spanish Inquisition, a presence characterized by William Monter as “overtly colonial and resented as such.”13 Another historian, Denis Mack Smith, describes the situation as follows: “From 1487 onwards the notorious Torquemada was sending Inquisitors to Sicily, and soon a permanent institution was properly organized with its headquarters in the royal palace at Palermo. Naples successfully resisted the introduction of the Holy office; but in Sicily, though there was some initial opposition to it, to be enrolled as an Inquisition official was soon regarded as a great privilege by the Sicilian nobility. The chief Inquisitors were always, or almost always, Spaniards.”14 That the Inquisition, consciously or not, found its way onto the Spanish stage is not surprising, given that the Holy Office’s power was predicated on a well-attended ritual, the auto-da-fé. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer define this as “a public gathering in which the ‘penitents,’ as the Inquisition called them, paraded before a gathered crowd, wearing garments known as sanbenitos (smocks bearing an insignia symbolizing the prisoner’s crime) and corozas (similar to dunce caps) symbolizing shame.”15 The highly spectacular aspect of the auto-da-fé has been remarked on by historians, even when noting its modest execution rate as compared to other European juridical systems. Monter, for example, writes that “none pronounced its judgments more theatrically,” while Kamen is at pains “not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated.”16 Mack Smith points out that in Sicilian autos-da-fé “the choreography was always carefully devised to make each occasion entertaining and instructive for as many spectators as possible,” and Nadia Zeldes observes that in Palermo the “spectacle began with a procession, which made its way from the Inquisitor’s house … to the square beneath the Viceroy’s palace … [and] usually included the appareance [sic] of the inquisitors, the alguacil and other officials as well as armed familiars of the Inquisition.”17 In other words, the auto-da-fé was a cautionary sort of Grand Guignol avant la lettre, helping to explain its effectiveness as a tool for the enforcement of orthodoxy meant to instill a “salutary fear; as the Castilian glossator of Eymeric’s ancient handbook for Inquisitors remarked in 1578, ‘there is no doubt that to instruct and terrify the people by proclaiming the sentences and imposing the sanbenitos is a good method.’”18 The following analysis holds that the plays dramatizing the life of San Benito for a seventeenth-century public implicitly portrayed the implementation of this “salutary fear” even as they interrogated social behaviors deemed proper in the age.Of the black saints before and during the sixteenth century, Benito is the most historically verifiable. The others are most commonly North African early martyrs such as St. Victor, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicity, while the fourth-century ascetic St. Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the patriarch of all monks. Benito’s most renowned predecessor—the first black of any nation to be canonized—is St. Maurice, the individual composite of a legendary Egyptian battalion that refused to bow down before Roman gods. Yet his “historical existence is so doubtful that more than once the legitimacy of his cult has been vigorously contested.”19 Although Maurice’s very name resonates with North African Moorish-ness, artistic depictions regularly portrayed him as a black, and as such he became the patron for the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages. From this perspective, Benito was the early modern Habsburg heir apparent to Maurice, who was emblematic of “the Holy Roman Emperor’s right to rule nothing less than all the earth.”20 Depictions of St. Maurice diminished during the fifteenth century as the Atlantic slave trade developed; there are even late sixteenth-century paintings of a white St. Maurice by El Greco and the Italian artist Rómulo Cincinnato.21 Thus, the Spanish crown’s promotion of Benito seems to have been an attempt to find a “homegrown” saint whose reach would surpass that of St. Maurice. The Felipes of Spain, after all, headed “a global empire of which Italy was a central part,”22 and their patronage of Benito evinces a desire to be recognized on their own terms as rulers over people of all nations and races.23 Just after the appearance of Lope de Vega’s play in 1607, a direct link between the monarchy and Benito was established: “In 1608 King Felipe III contributed twelve-hundred ducados for the construction of a silver casket that would hold the remains of the future saint” (El rey Felipe III colaboró en 1608 con una limosna de mil doscientos ducados para la elaboración de un ataúd de plata donde reposasen los restos del futuro santo).24 The royal donor is alluded to in Vélez’s play when it is prophesied that “el monarca mayor del orbe todo / se nombrará tu dueño,” lines that equate the Spanish king with the Lord of all creation while predicting the slave’s service to both.25 The prophecy (an encomiastic trope) also seems to acknowledge Benito’s evangelical (and Spain’s political) power when it says that his “deeds will astound many nations, and tame lands across the sea.”26Contemporaneously, the Inquisition’s desire to place its imprimatur on Benito is asserted in the last sentence of the first hagiography, which grants permission for the future saint to be depicted with signs of celestial splendor: “And the holy Inquisition of Sicily, aware of his great holiness and many legally proven miracles, gave license for him to be painted with rays of light and a halo on his head as signs of his heavenly reward” (Y la santa Inquisición de Sicilia, atenta a su gran santidad y muchos Milagros jurídicamente comprobados, dio licencia para que se pintase con rayos de resplandor y diadema en la cabeza en señal de la que goza en la bienaventuranza).27 Does Benito’s path from a slave of man to a slave of God simply reflect his usefulness for the purposes of propagating orthodoxy? This is the interpretation foregrounded in the hagiographies. However, the dramatizations of his life would also have resonated with anyone living under the Spanish Inquisition as a critique of that institution and its officers. Although the Spanish Inquisition was the creation of the Catholic Kings, this did not mean that the Holy Office felt obliged to bend to the monarchy’s will at all times, and some of the conflict in the plays is attributable to discord of this nature. Furthermore, from a postcolonial, globalized, and “postracial” point of view, the substratum of honor disputes in both plays proves as interesting as the primary (if counterfactual) conversion tale, because it shows Benito cast in the role of mediator between Sicilian and Spanish nobles, pointing up sociopolitical tension on the island.Historically, one focal point for resentment of the Inquisition was the Holy Office’s familiars: “It was in the Italian provinces of the Spanish crown that the greatest and most successful revolts against the Inquisition occurred. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the tribunal’s familiars.”28 Familiars, men with written proof of a bloodline untainted by Jew or Muslim (a prerequisite to holding office in the Spanish bureaucracy), numbered at times in the thousands in Sicily. Even Lope trumpeted his status as a familiar on the frontispiece of several works, including El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, possibly as a way of immunizing himself against potential accusations of blasphemy. In any event, Sicilians “from all classes of society tried to become familiars and thus escape liability in proceedings which gave little chance to the accused. … In order to increase its authority throughout the island where it was deeply mistrusted as part of Iberian imperialism, the Holy Office adopted a policy of making rural noblemen into familiars; they eagerly grasped at a title which guaranteed immunity from arrest by royal officials and punishment by royal courts.”29These circumstances led to “guerrilla warfare” between viceroys and inquisitors in Sicily in the late sixteenth century.30 For example, when in 1589 the viceroy Alba tried and executed a familiar before the Inquisition’s tribunal could claim jurisdiction, “both parties appealed to Philip II who, after examining all the documents, wrote to Alva [Alba], March 29, 1590, strongly reproving him for bringing such scandal and discredit on an institution so necessary for the peace and quiet of the land.”31 The king “was firmly convinced that the Inquisition was essential to keep Sicily in subjection, which accounts for his upholding it against his own representatives.”32 Viceroy Alba, in addition to challenging the authority of the Inquisition during his tenure in Sicily, favored and consulted with Benito on occasion. Daza’s hagiography mentions this, and indeed, it is Alba whose daughter is exorcised by the saint in Lope’s play, an incident suggestive of the viceroy’s untenable situation, his near “possession” by an office more powerful than his. At the center of strife among Sicilians, Spaniards and their king, then, stands the Inquisition, which competed with the viceroy for the king’s favor, although in practice the two Sicilian Inquisitors were only answerable to the Suprema, the Holy Office’s high council in Madrid.33Historian Helmut G. Koenigsberger surmises that “nothing could show more clearly the confused and undeveloped state of Spanish ideas in imperial administration than [the] struggle between the civil government and the Inquisition in Sicily.”34 This state of affairs is in effect reproduced onstage alongside more imaginative scenes from the saint’s life. The two San Benito dramas gloss over Mediterranean history and more discreetly gloss Sicilian circumstances of the day in order to broach controversial topics without drawing the ire of the censor, paradoxically bringing us closer to the truth of the times. Beyond evincing the zeal of the newly converted, the dramatic role of Benito is that of a reconciler who curtails potentially disastrous clashes between representatives of the Spanish crown and officers of the local government, as well as between “honorable” men and women, all the while raising questions about the Inquisition.The Names of a SaintLope’s protagonist Rosambuco (Benito’s prebaptismal name in both plays) is at first blush a stereotype, as indicated by this name that signifies the blossom of the elderberry bush, a white flower emerging from a black-fruited plant. After a series of divine interventions, he is convinced that he should abandon his “natural” faith, Islam, for Catholicism. Although the historical Benito was as Sicilian as any first-generation child of immigrant parents, the plays foreground his purported Ottoman otherness, in spite of the Castilian Spanish he in to the of the African when one of is Beyond the of his life for a Spanish Benito’s is by his to a with legendary by in North while the name Rosambuco it also resonates with a Sicilian that was from a to a during Benito’s in the plays with and and commonly in popular with its in order to the his a for the through the of his with and the and by with However, the in the plays is so to modern that easily be from other such as that link Benito to the by its in either play is the of the name San In the alguacil when he calls Rosambuco him from the by Rosambuco to him as gran In the saint is to as the between Benito and the Inquisition is as as in in of The first the of the Saint Benedict order first the in the Middle this is by of or as “the insignia of the holy Inquisition, on the and of the insignia de la santa que y del terms and in the of the Holy Office to the saint’s a of which could have been a “a black on which were painted and other to wearing the had to it on he out of a practice by no popular in the first of the Monter notes that when to the had or to their sanbenitos be over an but from in order to be in churches as a of bringing on and for became practice to and sanbenitos with bearing the of the this caused “In the against the Spanish government in Sicily in the sanbenitos in the churches were down and In that in his in Palermo, as the wearing of on the sanbenitos of the who were very and he the people to the of from the Sicilian to Spanish rule was to the for at a before the saint of the name was as be from the were one to either was the would be the is felt from the in Lope’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, which with a from great an (and on the part of a good man into an life. The of a he to himself down from its but and he the slave of the In the of an honor an in a between the and who his of In an the first of several to Benito’s as a but this when his into a In as noted the future saint a from the viceroy’s to the Benito, but when the the of the over the it in calls an of a Benito his own life for that of who after to in a house the so of his that he is to he his is clearly that of an en a la then, did not out to the this He says he is with the of and as well as the of the Inquisition when a is to the / de a familiar of the Holy is the Inquisition, with while under the authority of Sicily’s are out in the name of honor and and when the Spanish him he the alguacil as “the man Sicily has al / que that and his in the even though his in the play place in the is and his near to Sicilian of the times. In 1590, for example, the made a of the of the up the house in which and his officials and were and would have … Soon when the to arrest some he was for a in Palermo that to the auto-da-fé. The first great auto-da-fé was in following for the first time in the of … It was that be on so as to public … The also on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own a that led to with officials of both and who were to of to the to the of Benito’s his cloistered years in an took on in an he would before the incident in Lope’s play his African for a thus his of has his to him by at the viceroy’s up and Spanish to each other as to a that is on the of the of in his raising about his Rosambuco to his for is only by the divine of a of the St. these not only the many autos-da-fé in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth but also the of authority by the of in the Vélez play will be but more the with the that him from Lope’s to down house with the in as will be the African is and although not however, Lope’s slave a closer in the black “natural” for a for and as a critique of honor and the virtue of their in the of in these would have the who but not the that seems at first to be the black of the a to of the that make Rosambuco are in … The at even though they make an for the (and African slave for an Roman is the of the play is simply of the Spanish attempt to the for not only because it is a but because that are of will the in the Vélez Spanish popular in a that in Lope would into one of his most renowned El de The they the the of the flower of al a la de la de is by as / a la / de / la de is a of to but the a out of the the that a is very a of another for for calls to the place from which for the of This the that the de will for Golden Age Spain, the of honor that Lope as one to popular in his de comedias en is and but his in the and the to and the only punishment that seems to is that of with mentions it This to is by of the que to to a from a Benito, a in order to who this, Rosambuco of one of several by the it is who in the of Lope’s play to us that has an by the out the to the house from It is not the to as the seems to with some that the of Spanish is on a of and under the of the In that with all of the and in Palermo, will found a in honor of the saint, an that points the of the play to link Benito to Catholic play with the in Palermo of a de such as the one that had in the of popular an of orthodoxy in the of to the and of a such as the Holy the of an aspect of the or a each other in times of and most the Holy of the and in Spain to be of and to their purpose was that of a which and could be including “the struggle for in the creation of that were more than of the of the dominant of Spanish of any is the a by in This is from the that a of the Inquisition when over to the and led to the Lope’s play the with a of the saint, with a of from the a a and a of to Vélez de Guevara’s play, El negro del serafín with a of an on

Agustín José Menèndez

One thing is certain about Brexit: The allegedly ‘unpredictable’ outcome of the referendum has fed a new scholarly fad. ‘Instant’ working papers, instant special issues, even instant books have already been written, dealing with the backstage of the Brexit campaign, the ‘causes’ of the popular ‘revolt’ and the plots and counterplots in the corridors of power and the antechambers of spin doctors. The supply of futurologist analyses of the consequences of Brexit to the (dis)United Kingdom are also in strong supply. The paradox of Brexit as a ‘pop-out’ academic industry is that most of the enthusiastic academic entrepreneurs that have built the field implicitly endorse the perspective of most radical Brexiteers by focusing almost exclusively on the British side of the affair. As if Brexit was an entirely British issue, as if the state of the European Union did not influence the outcome, as if the United Kingdom leaving the European Union was not bound to affect the European Union too. Listening to some of the debates, one might be forgiven for entertaining the thought that Brexit is even more paradoxical than the unwritten but very written British Constitution, given that it boils down to the divorce of a polity that remained rather unengaged all these years. Thus, it is not far-fetched to conclude that Brexit requires scholarly analysis that tackles the structural causes and the structural implications of a momentous decision for both the United Kingdom and the European Union. Majone's sober and balanced piece provides a much needed counterpoint to the mass of on-the-hoof analysis. Instead of focusing on the short-term vagaries of electoral politics, or divining the outcomes of the ongoing bargaining games, Majone sets Brexit in its long-term context, showing the extent to which it is a further (and still very important) symptom of the structural crises the European Union is going through. Perhaps even more importantly, Majone renews his plea for thinking European integration along very different lines from the ones favoured by mainstream EU studies, namely as a concentric set of functional ‘unions’, capable of complementing the capacities of Member States without eroding the basis of their democratic legitimacy. Both Majone's diagnosis and prognosis are bound to be highly polemical, in the best ELJ tradition. The European Central Bank (ECB) has gained major new formal competences and substantive powers as a result of the many transformations triggered by the manifold European crises. This more than justifies reconsidering the foundations of the legitimacy of the ECB, and more specifically, how the said legitimacy depends on the institutional setup and procedures that ensure the ECB acts in a transparent fashion and remains accountable to supranational and national representative institutions. This is precisely what Curtin invites us to do in her contribution. The accrual of new powers to the ECB, both through explicit changes in the law, and perhaps even more so, due to emerging conventions among European and national institutions, requires that we reconsider the legitimacy equation of the ECB, that we not only test both the accountability and the transparency of the ECB, but also, and perhaps above all, the relationship(s) between the two. Curtin cautiously leans towards (on-the-alert) scepticism. There is no doubt that the ECB has become more active in presenting itself as a transparent institution, and has indeed devised and deployed a ‘communication’ strategy. Still, ‘managed’ transparency is hardly conducive to the kind of accountability that can be demanded from any public institution, no matter how capable of mobilising expert knowledge. To put it differently, unilateral ‘communication’ initiatives cannot by themselves guarantee legitimacy, because there is always the risk that, without further checks and balances, they become clever legitimising ploys. But checks and balances are few and far between. The powers not only of national parliaments but also of the European Parliament are limited to engaging with the ECB in a ‘monetary dialogue’ largely steered by the ECB itself. By the same token, members of the public (individuals, organisations and media) can only have access to ECB documents if and when the ECB finds it appropriate to release them. The different polemics around Trichet's penchant for writing letters prove the point rather abundantly. That the ECB has stonewalled when required by national parliaments to release letters that were of essence in reconstructing the causal chain leading to the request for financial assistance by the Irish state, the ‘express’ amendment of the Spanish Constitution in 2011 or a rather particular change of government in Italy at the end of that same year is not exactly reassuring. I come back briefly at the end of this editorial to the issue. Byberg adds a very important new block to the edifice of the emerging history of European law as a scholarly discipline. Her article breaks the promising ground of research into the history of law journals by offering us the key elements of the history of the Common Market Law Review, the leading (black-letter) journal on European law. Relying on the archives of the journal itself and on interviews with the ‘founding fathers’ of the journal (no founding mothers, quite revealingly), Byberg paints a vivid fresco, which is at the same time a reminder of the fragility and resilience of scholarly journals, of the twists and turns through which scholarly fields are established and defined, and of the complex relationship between EU scholars and the EU as a polity and power centre. Byberg's historian's knack for combining the big and the small picture results in a contribution that throws light on the coming of age of EU law by means of focusing on the details. While the disciplinary lenses are rather different ones, McRea's piece is also one that makes use of history to throw light on the present European Union. It seems to me that McRea touches one of the raw nerves of European integration: its militant ‘telos’ so punchily summarised by the motto ever closer Union. McRea notes that the phrase is not only a clever rhetorical trick, but has become over time part and parcel of the constitutional (un)conscious of the European Union, to the point that the coherence of the present setup of the European Union is dependent on the expectation, almost certainty, that further powers will be centralised, further policies will be developed, and further resources will be managed by supranational institutions. But what if the promissory note cannot redeemed? Then, as we may be learning the hard way in the last two decades, a half-full glass may not only be a half-empty glass, but also a rapidly depleting half-empty glass. What yesteryear were regarded as the embryo of further institutional structures or policies are revealing themselves to be inconsistent institutional setups (viz. the Eurogroup) or policies (EMU), too rigid to make the complex (‘half-made’) Union work. McRea's key message may be that good bicycles are those capable of standing even if the cyclist is not pedalling furiously. Nicolosi provides a carefully crafted analysis of the right to asylum in European constitutional law, and in particular, of Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. This article, even if crystallising the constitutional traditions common to the Member States and the practice around the European Convention of Human Rights, can be fairly said to have given a further impulse to the formal commitment of European states to the right to asylum. But the proof of the cake is always in the eating, something that can perhaps be translated into legalese by reminding ourselves that where there is no remedy, there is no right. Nicolosi stresses the extent to which the substantive content of the right to asylum relies on the close connection between the right to asylum and the right not to be expelled when in danger (a right which fittingly given its origins is referred as non refoulement), and should have a decisive normative horizontal effect on the interpretation of the whole set of European migration norms, including the (in)famous Dublin rules (subject to detailed analysis in recent issues of this journal) and the (even more in)famous EU–Turkey ‘statement’ (or in plain English, agreement between the EU and Turkey on the refugee crisis, which has also been critically reviewed in these pages). Joerges and Kreuder-Sonnen offer a panoramic analysis of the evolution of EU studies in the last decade, a period marked by the many, overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises that have pushed off balance the European Union. The core thesis of the article is that both political scientists and lawyers have turned a blind eye to the structural challenges that underlie the crises. It is not only that EU studies were slow in coming to terms with the crises, but also that the crises have been downplayed by EU scholars by means of divorcing the analysis of the transformation of the European Union and of European law from the normative implications of the mutating and mutated Europe. Political scientists have approached massive changes in the institutional setup of the Union, the governance architecture of European Monetary Union or public attitudes towards integration as if they did not have far-reaching constitutional and normative implications. This worrying blindness to normative implications is the price that has been paid to keep on using the conceptual and analytical grid of neo-functionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism and historical institutionalism (of pretending, in short, that it was possible to do business as usual). By the same token, legal scholarship has closed its eyes to the rather obvious birthmarks of the whole set of legal norms produced in the name of containing and overcoming the crises (‘crisis law’) by means of radicalising the normative asepsis of the constitutional theories that mainstream EU legal scholarship has cultivated in the last three decades: treaty constitutionalism, economic constitutionalism, functional constitutionalism. Joerges and Kreuder-Sonnen note, however, that the critical fringes are gaining traction: not only we can see new politico-scientific paradigms and constitutional theories coming to the fore, but also the emergence of critical voices within established paradigms denouncing the divorce of facts and norms. It is perhaps this mixture between the old and the new that authors find congenial to their approach, which perhaps can be summarised by Hume's dictum: ‘If false, let [these] arguments [be] rejected: But no one ought to entertain a prejudice against them, merely because they are out of the common road’. The issue has an ‘extra track’ in the form of an analysis of the possible causes and likely implications of the decision of the Danish Supreme Court in the Anjo case. Non-discrimination on the basis of age has proven again to be a minefield when it comes to the relationship between European legal orders. On its surface, Anjo can be said to be a replay of Mangold. Perhaps reassured by the déjà vu traits of the case, the European Court of Justice failed to notice that when the Danish Supreme Court sent it a preliminary question before deciding the case, this was far from a routine preliminary question. Luxembourg judges failed to realise the hand they were being asked to play, and limited themselves to instruct Danish Courts to solve the conflict between what EU law seemed to require (rendering effective, even among private parties, the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of age) and the legal solution the Danish Court reputed stemmed from Danish law (not rendering the principle effective, in particular on the basis of the clear and well-established interpretation of the relevant pieces of law by the Supreme Court itself militating against) by interpreting Danish law in line with what EU law required. Indeed, Advocate General Bot seemed to suggest that it sufficed the Supreme Court to change its own construction of Danish law. But that was precisely what the Danish Court was resolved not to do. As Madsen, Olsen and Šadl point out, that was not only a bridge too far, but also a move coming too late in the jurisprudential (and perhaps social and political) game. While the Danish Supreme Court had a long track record of being ready to be as pragmatic as needed to avoid conflicts between EU law and Danish law, things had changed by the end of 2016. Not only had the very composition of the Supreme Danish Court changed, but the socio-economic environment had rapidly evolved (as perhaps attentive readers of newspapers could have noticed). There were indeed clear signals of the new spirit of the age in the last big ruling of the Danish Court on European matters of 2013. Anjo may perhaps come to be regarded as an isolated instance of unease. Still, Madsen, Olsen and Šadl remind us that the stance of the Danish Supreme Court could also set the tone for further developments in other European countries. For the times they are achanging. And perhaps the CJEU judges should occasionally read the biographies of, say, Alf Ross. A final coda. Curtin's article engages with fundamental theoretical questions which have immediate and very visible practical implications. Consider, for example, access to ECB documents, and more precisely, access to the legal opinions on the basis of which the growing powers of the ECB are exerted. Whether these legal opinions are produced by the legal service of the ECB (‘in-house’), or commissioned to ‘external’ jurists, the fact of the matter is that it is consolidated institutional practice to be extremely selective in their publication. The rule of thumb is indeed that the opinions, very especially if dealing with ‘sensitive’ issues (and which issues decided by the ECB are not sensitive?), are covered by a veil of secrecy. This is the case for the ECB, but is also the institutional practice of the other European institutions. In the early days of European integration, it was not fully implausible (even if at the end of the day hardly persuasive) to claim that the very ‘international’ character of the Communities rendered advisable sheltering the legal services from too close a public scrutiny, which could perhaps undermine the forging of a genuinely supranational vision, hardly to be expected to emerge if there was constant blaming and shaming of legal opinions and institutional lawyers along national lines. However, such line of reasoning cannot be even tried if the said legal services promote a ‘constitutional’ reading of European law (as Byberg's article reminds us, the ‘constitutional turn’ in the interpretation of EU law is part and parcel of the very identity of European law as a discipline). If indeed European law is worthy of being constructed in a constitutional key, then the publicity of legal opinions should also be approached from a constitutional perspective, which would require publicity, not confidentiality. The alternative argument according to which the legal opinions of the legal services of the institutions are protected by the ‘attorney-client’ privilege is just a poor substitute of the original rationale of secrecy. Leaving aside the fact that no public institution can be regarded as an ‘ordinary client’, it is to be expected, and indeed desired, that legal advice offered to public institutions be provided with the expectation that it will be made public at the end of the day. Citizens have a collective interest in advice being so provided as to stand the test of being rendered public. Not only political decision-making in a democratic state should be based on public, not private reasons; but those providing legal advice to public institutions should not be given the impression that they are advising those holding public office in personam. It is one thing to be the lawyer of the ECB; another to be the lawyer of the President of the ECB. The only effective way of keeping the proper distinctions in place is for the general rule to be that legal opinions are always rendered public. Certainly, there can be good reasons to delay publication: the public good is occasionally served by not revealing what state institutions are going to do long before they do it. In other words, it would be unwise to reveal the legal and policy hand of institutions if doing so would by definition undermine the very effectiveness of the decisions envisaged. But that only provides a justification for delaying publication (and only within reasonable time limits), not for keeping legal advice to public institutions eternally secret (or secret for 50 years, which is almost the same). It is indeed standard practice in democratic states to render public all the legal opinions provided to public institutions. Why should the European Union not do the same? 1 In the coming months this question may well be widely discussed as a result of the legal proceedings launched by the former Greek Chancellor of the Exchequer, 2 Yannis Varoufakis, with the aim of rendering public the legal opinions it seems the ECB commissioned 3 before taking some of its more fateful decisions ever. On 4 February 2015, the ECB reverted the policy it had followed since the beginning of the Greek fiscal crisis, and established that Greek debt did not constitute good enough collateral with a view to getting access to standard ECB liquidity. This implied that Greek banks were forced to rely on ‘last resort’ liquidity through the so-called Emergency Liquidity Assistance (as discussed by Tuori in his article in the previous issue of this journal). Such assistance is not only more expensive, but is not provided by the ECB, but by the relevant national central bank, but still under the tight supervision and control of the ECB. Formally speaking, the decision was justified on the basis that it was no longer certain that a new programme of financial assistance between Greece and the Eurozone would be concluded in the immediate future, and that rendered Greek public debt ineligible as collateral. In substantive terms, however, the decision came literally days after a new Greek government had come into office, and with weeks to run of the extended programme of financial assistance to Greece. This rendered the decision problematic on two accounts. Firstly, was the decision in line with the very practice of the ECB since 2010? Was it reasonable to regard now Greek public debt as too risky when it had not been deemed so before, even at times at which uncertainty over the developments in Greece were equally or even more intense? Secondly, did the ECB need to take the decision at that point in time or should it have waited? If the decision had not been taken once elections have been called for, why take it when a new government had just come into office? The second ECB decision was taken on 28 June 2015, perhaps at the apex of the third episode of the Greek fiscal crisis, during the fateful referendum campaign of late June and early July 2015. By then, Greek banks had been relying on the emergency liquidity assistance provided by the Greek Central Bank for months. As noted, the ECB did not provide liquidity, but exerted tight control over the terms according to which it was provided. There were no clear formal rules on how the ECB should decide. It would perhaps not be far-fetched to add that the ECB seemed to prefer avoiding pre-committing itself to any set of ex ante rules or guidelines, preferring ‘point to point’ refinancing, if one is allowed a nautical metaphor. 4 Quite predictably, this resulted in the liquidity needs of Greek banks being ever bigger, as they haemorrhaged deposits (the better-off making use of free movement of capital to place their money elsewhere, the middle classes and the worse-off withdrawing their pennies and placing them under their mattresses). While the ECB had been increasing the liquidity ceiling on 28 June it decided to it. This the Greek state with no other than a and not only free movement of but also that the ECB could not but the consequences of its and that the had not changed on 28 was the ECB justified in taking such a Indeed, again in view of the was the ECB in constitutional terms, to take such a The former Greek Chancellor of the is of the view that the legal opinions commissioned by the ECB before taking these two decisions should be because they can throw light not only on the issues at but also on the decision-making of the ECB. The ECB has to release the opinions, the arguments and it seems special to the need to the ‘attorney-client’ It seems to me it is of essence to keep and the one may entertain on the substantive of the decisions taken by the ECB and the question the legal opinions should be a picture of what during the months of late and early 2015, as the third episode of the Greek fiscal cannot but be in the public Greek to very especially those have most as a But that is not merely a Greek European have an interest in the of not only what was but also why it was of the legal is what the publication of the opinions will reveal to and of the economic and political of the decisions taken by all European institutions, but by the ECB. it is hard to avoid the that a constitutional would be allowed to the power of and of the ECB over the financial institutions of the That is the of the of the ECB something to which the Advocate General in the Monetary ruling came close as Joerges and Kreuder-Sonnen remind us in their contribution to this issue. In other two after the and with the issues at long the public interest cannot be on keeping the opinions but on them. This case could indeed into a decisive to the veil of that legal opinions in EU law once and for Citizens have a right to the including the legal on the basis of which they are This is not the case if access to decisive legal opinions is in the name of arguments out of place in a democratic and the very constitutional which is said to the practice of European institutions. to the legal opinions of the ECB on liquidity assistance to Greek but indeed all opinions of the legal services of and would be a at the national Why is not at the European