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This commentary interrogates, first, Justice Antonin Scalia's assertion in Employment Division v. Smith that the law must uphold the belief-action distinction in order to preserve democratic norms and, second, the affect that this distinction had on Alfred Smith's relationship with his faith. I argue that as Smith responded to the law's repeated requests for justification as to why his religious convictions ought to exempt him from the criminal regulation of peyote, he experienced a profound sense of legal, political, and spiritual disempowerment – a disempowerment compounded by the erasure of the complexities of his faith in both the decision and aftermath of Smith. By way of making this argument, I bring Scalia, Smith, and Smith into sustained conversation with an unlikely interlocutor: Jürgen Habermas. As one of the leading legal and political theorists of religion in the late modern moment, Habermas articulates a vision of democratic life that at once venerates public religious expression and insulates law- and policy-making institutions from faith-based influence. Habermas's vision is often characterized by contemporary political theorists and legal academics as the ideal to which all religiously plural democracies should aspire, but when his argument is considered alongside the experiences of Smith before the Court, a powerful disjuncture between theory and practice emerges. For although Habermas encourages religious individuals to adopt an epistemic stance of public reason and to engage in cooperative acts of translation in order to settle collaboratively the appropriate limits of religion as well as the law, I argue that, when applied to Smith, these methods of discursive engagement work to not only underscore the absolute primacy of the law over religion, but also to undercut Smith's own understanding of his faith. I ultimately suggest that this mode of inquiry – that is to say, infusing theory with nuances gleamed from the everyday legal lives of ordinary individuals – generates new pathways through which to ameliorate latent social and political harms.

Greece is member of the EU since 1.1.1981. The accession of Greece to the European Community was signed and ratified by the Greek Parliament in 1979 with a majority of 193 votes out of 300. Article 28 of the Constitution of 1975 provided the legal basis of the incorporation of Community law into the Greek legal order. According to article 28 competencies provided by the constitution can be vested in agencies of international organizations by treaties or agreements, when this serves an important national interest and promotes co-operation with other states. European Community law has pervasive effects upon the Greek legal order and the regulations have direct applicability and effect in Greece.When required, domestic law is adapted to the provisions of Community law. In addition, Greek law belongs to the civil law tradition. The era of modern Greek law began with the National Revolution of 1821 against the Turks, which led to the creation of the Greek State in 1830. The most important codifications in Greek law are the following: Civil Code, Commercial Code, Penal Code, Code of Civil Procedure, Code of Criminal Procedure, Code of Private Maritime Law and Military Penal Code. The Greek Civil Code of 1946 was greatly influenced by Byzantine law, which was applied in Greece before the drafting of the Civil Code. The Civil Code is founded on the principles of personal autonomy, private property and freedom of contract. It also protects the institution of family, with equality between the sexes, being constitutionally proclaimed. It contains, however, general clauses, leaving space for judicial adaptation to changing circumstances aswell as for the introduction of elements of fairness . Main objective of this paper is to analyze Greece's Obligations law in a comparative view with the European law. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p127

We examine predictive group profiling in the Big Data context as an instrument of governmental control and regulation. We first define profiling by drawing some useful distinctions (section 6.1). We then discuss examples of predictive group profiling from policing (such as parole prediction methods taken from the us) and combatting fraud (the icov and syri systems in the Netherlands) (section 6.2). Three potential risks of profiling – the negative impact on privacy; social sorting and discrimination; and opaque decision-making – are discussed in section 6.3. We then turn to the legal framework. Is profiling by governmental agencies adequately framed? Are existing legal checks and balances sufficient to safeguard civil liberties? We discuss the relationship between profiling and the right to privacy (section 6.4) and between profiling and the prohibition on discrimination (section 6.5). The jurisprudence on the right to privacy clearly sets limits to the use of automated and predictive profiling. Profiling and data screening which interfere without distinction with the privacy of large parts of the population are disproportional. Applications need to have some link to concrete fact to be legitimate. An additional role is played by the prohibition of discrimination, which requires strengthening through the development of audit tools and discrimination-aware algorithms. We then discuss current safeguards in Dutch administrative, criminal procedure and data protection law (section 6.6), and witness a trend of weakening safeguards at the very moment when they should be applied with even more rigor. In our conclusion, we point to the tension between profiling and legal safeguards. These safeguards remain important and need to be overhauled to make them effective again.

The main purpose of the article is to identify the contradictions and problems arising when both international labor standards and Russian labor law are applied and separate guarantees to workers are provided in the case of their dismissal. The object of the research is the employment relationship which arises between the employer and the employee when social guarantees are given to the workers when the employment relations are terminated. This article considers the regulations of Russian and foreign labor law which provide workers with certain guarantees if the employment contract is terminated at the initiative of the employer. For the first time, these guarantees are considered from a comparative legal perspective. Specific recommendations about improvement of the Russian labor law and its enforcement.