This has been another INSANE ruling by the courts in Hamburg. They are well known to be little more than industry stooges and I can't count how many insane of their insane rulings have been overruled by higher courts.
So they're like the East District of Texas of the EU?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...
* https://www.logikcull.com/blog/the-supreme-court-frees-paten...
It would seem to me that the definition of a good judge is one who always predicts how a higher court would act, and acts the same.
In cases of press and internet law, many lawyers argue that the event happened everywhere in Germany, and that they are accordingly free to choose whatever place of venue they like.
Since the system works alright in general there's not much love from law professionnels for a change. This internet thing is just a fad anyway.
It’s uncharted land for all of us - Angela Merkel 2016, translated.
The most prominent example in more or less recent times is also from Hamburg: Ronald Schill, nicknamed "judge without mercy" for his harsh sentences, who was a judge at an Amtsgericht (the lowest level of ordinary jurisdiction) in Hamburg from 1993 to 2001. He then went into politics for a right-wing law-and-order party he founded, that prospered for a short period of time in Hamburg that even entered into a coalition government with the CDU and made him second mayor and senator of the interior of Hamburg.[2]
[1] Art. 97 GG. [2] The Wikipedia article about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Schill contains some hair-raising details about his views and actions.
I was in court the other day when a criminal defendant's case was brought back up because it had been reversed on appeal due to the judge making errors in his instructions to the jury. The defendant had already spent five years in prison and to avoid another trial decided to take an offer by the prosecutor to go home that day in exchange for his guilty plea. The judge just chuckled as they read out the reversal order and basically said (not verbatim) "Whoopsie, my bad." For wrongly convicting a person.
In fact, now you have me thinking about it, I can't remember a single time being in court where a judge has taken a reversal seriously. All of their reactions have always been flippant and jovial.
Some judges get extraordinary amounts of reversals.
Judges regularly piss the appellate courts off with their shitty work. I can think of two local criminal cases recently where the appellate courts were mad because they ruled in both cases that there was absolutely no evidence of the guilt of the defendant. Another one I was in court for - a prisoner presented a 17 count suit against the prison guards for essentially torturing him over a decade-long period and the judge flicked through it and simply said "case dismissed". The guy flipped out in court. The appellate court reversed, but they were shocked because each of the 17 counts needed a several-step analysis to determine its credibility and the judge did nothing -- and the appeals court then had to do all the work. That particular judge is super hilarious when his robe is off and we are all waiting around in the courtroom - he'll shoot the shit with me all day, and then put his robe on and deny all my motions lol.