Due to the coalition agreement of CDU/CSU and SPD the German Government shall implement a new act on corporate criminal liability before the end of the current election period. After an informal draft from the ministry in lead, the BMJV, was leaked to the public this issue is frequently discussed in the media. The author tries to give an overview on the main items of the draft law, the major concerns against it and the mediating draft of the Munich Concept.

In this comment piece, I will seek to examine the relationship between cryptocurrencies and virtual currencies from a compliance perspective. I will tie this to the underlying theme from multiple studies, that a lack of knowledge of these products means more needs to be done by policymakers and the crypto industry to form cohesive and understandable standards that unearth what these products are, how they are used and how compliance analysts can be best supported to apply best practice procedures when conducting due-diligence checks. I will seek to lay out the advantages and disadvantages of recent developments and explore the challenges they pose on a socio-economic and macro level. This piece dissects the topic through four chapters. The first ties it into developments that unfolded during the global financial crisis, the use of collateralized debt obligations and other derivatives-based financial instruments, ultimately showing how a lack of knowledge was an underlying theme within the banking system during the 2008 global financial crisis. The second chapter combines the theme of knowledge and awareness of a product with the way in which people view cryptocurrency and digital coins, including regulators, courts and policymakers. The third explores recent developments from international central banks and governments, from sanctioned countries using of the product to help their citizens to international alliances forming across the globe in support of central-bank digital currencies. The final chapter unpacks the advantages and disadvantages of using these financial instruments, from countries in the global south suffering from scams to the pressure it takes on energy efficiency, concluding that more needs to be done to educate users, regulators and everyone in between for the success of the digital currency to be fully realized.

Michele DeStefano, founder and Content Curator of CEJ, is a Professor of Law at Miami Law and the director and founder of LawWithoutWalls. Guenther Dobrauz-Saldapenna is a Partner with PwC in Zurich, Leader of PwC Legal Switzerland, a member of PwC’s Global Legal Leadership Team directing the firm’s global legal practice and the firm’s Global LegalTech Leader. DeStefano and Dobrauz are editors of the book “New Suits. Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World” published in June 2019. It combines the expertise of 47 (!) authors, many of whom are already proven experts in the worldwide legal tech scene.

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The Austrian Act on Corporate Criminal Liability (VbVG) entered force on 1 January 2006 and has now been in effect fourteen years. The following article will evaluate the VbVG’s frequency of application in practice and critically examine the dominance of procedural termination (rather than prosecution) at the discretion of the district attorney’s office.

The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive came into force on 16 December 2019. Switzerland continues to struggle with this topic: the Swiss National Council (Nationalrat) dismissed a draft law on its introduction on 3 June 2019 and, after the Swiss Council of States (Ständerat) approved the draft law without changes on 16 December 2019, dismissed it again on 5 March 2020.

The article deals with the liability of board members for decisions to minimize business risks resulting from the pandemic. Based on an important decision by the highest German criminal court on a case of the 2008 financial crisis, the article outlines the limits of a safe haven within which managers can make decisions without fear of legal consequences.

Churches have been prompted to rethink the format of preaching and the content of sermons since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent restrictions on church gatherings. What does preaching look like, or what may it look like in times of crisis? These questions arose, specifically considering the content of sermons in the week before and after the national lockdown was announced in South Africa. Using Grounded Theory, the content of sermons delivered during this period was examined in order to identify an emerging theory regarding the homiletical content. From these findings, a homiletic praxis theory is formulated for preaching in times like these. The tension between proximity and distance that is experienced by hearers and proclaimed by preachers is explored. Habits of faith and discernment emerge as core concepts in mitigating this tension and in navigating the thin spaces that are created by liminal times such as these.

The fourth volume of the International Journal of Homiletics opens with an article from South Africa presenting first results of an empirical research on preaching in times of the pandemic. Marileen Steyn, Cas Wepener and Hennie Pieterse, all three from Stellenbosch University, conducted a grounded theory exploration on Preaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa analyzing 24 sermons preached on March 22 and March 29 2020- during the time of the South African lockdown. They convincingly show that in an experience of ‘distance’ (to God and the others) sermons primarily try to present a God who is ‘near.’ The authors explore the ‘hinges’ preachers use to help people on the threshold between near and far. They also point to the role liturgy plays together with the words of the sermon and suggest Holy Saturday/Silent Saturday as a metaphor for the homiletical endeavor of preaching in times of crisis. The article is presented in our volume in an English and an Afrikaans version.

This thesis focuses on early beginnings of a video conferencing platform Zoom, its development and enormous rise during the global pandemic of COVID-19 disease, and on its influence on users. It focuses particularly on millennials who are already familiar with this kind of technology. The aim of this work is primarily to determine the effects of Zoom, as a video conferencing platform, on user's activities because they were used to perform them in a physical contact with other people. However, due to restrictions resulting from epidemiological measures, participants were forced to move their activities to the online environment. The thesis focuses on answering these research questions: How do people's behaviour, perception of the situation and their self-presentation change when using Zoom in comparison to a face-to-face meeting? How have the activities of users changed while using Zoom, due to COVID-19, namely March to December 2020? How and for what reasons do users use Zoom? How do users perceive Zoom's affordances? In order to answer these questions, qualitative research was conducted using semi-structured in-depth interviews. These were attended by ten respondents who regularly use Zoom for a certain activity that was carried out in personal before the pandemic. Respondents were millennials,...