Over a decade ago I was involved in a group project that focused on developing a regulatory model concerning the implementation of the precautionary principle in the EU. The project involved a number of workshops and in those workshops I used to joke about the fact that while there were many different frameworks being produced to represent risk regulation, these diagrams basically fell into two different categories. In the first category there were those diagrams that characterised risk regulation as a linear process involving usually a scientific process of risk assessment and then political processes of risk management and risk communication. In the second category there were those diagrams that had lots of looping arrows going all over the place that represented the fact that risk regulation was an iterative process that constantly involved many scientific, socio-political and other inputs.

Behind my joking was a sense of hope. The linear diagrams did have their minimalist appeal, but the messy diagrams captured much of the reality of this area of regulatory practice.

Harmonization is an essential instrument of international risk governance. It is the process through which disparities among national regulatory standards are ironed out, producing uniform outcomes that all participants in a regime can accept and that facilitate the free exchange of regulated goods in commerce. Contrary to conventional belief, however, harmonization requires not only technical but also political cooperation, since standards themselves are not direct mirrors of reality but are co-produced responses to technoscientific and political uncertainty. Attempts to harmonize standards across national borders therefore pit alternative political cultures and their systems of public reasoning against one another. Put differently, harmonization calls into question the underlying models of subsidiarity that provide the foundation for robust international regimes. This paper examines three models of epistemic subsidiarity – coexistence, cosmopolitanism, and constitutionalism – and discusses each scheme's capacity to protect a nation's fundamental political commitments while advancing the goals of international risk governance.

Member States wishing to cultivate genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have always been a minority in the EU. Only eight out of twenty-seven have experienced transgenic agriculture. Throughout the years, the opposition to this form of farming has become a genuinely transnational phenomenon given that many regions of different European countries declared themselves GMO-free. Moreover, Member States such as Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, Poland and, most recently, Hungary officially banned transgenic agriculture within their borders altogether. France and Germany suspended the cultivation of GM maize MON 810, respectively in 2008 and 2009.

In addition, the EU has previously authorized only two GM crops: GM maize MON 810 (authorization renewed in 2008) and GM potato EH92-527-1 (2010), known as the ‘Amflora potato.’ The cautious approach towards transgenic farming is also witnessed by the long and contested process of renewal of the permit to cultivate GM maize MON 810 and the issue of the authorization for the Amflora potato.

Ever more risky service activities are carried out across borders, creating spillovers and externalities. At the same time, if freedom to provide services is legally enabled, states can cooperate in multiple ways to mitigate the potential risks accruing from crossborder activities. Global Administrative Law Scholarship distinguishes five types of administrative regulation: “administration by formal international organizations; administrations based on collective action by transnational networks of governmental officials; distributed administration conducted by national regulators under treaty regimes, mutual recognition arrangements or cooperative standards; administration by hybrid intergovernmental–private arrangements; and administration by private institutions with regulatory functions. In practice many of these layers overlap or combine […]”. In the area of risky cross–border service provision, the EU has moved from a more decentralised version of networks and mutual recognition characterised by coordination and minimum harmonization of rules and standards to a more centralized commandand–control system with European authorities and supervision.

This article aims to analyse liability issues as a further means to regulate risks, in case the precautionary measures of the delivered safety system fail. Through liability, the risk that cannot be prevented can be transferred onto those parties who are in the best position to spread them. The allocation of liability thus works as an incentive to the correct functioning of the preventive measures. Liability rules appear to be a key legal remedy which can ensure both tort reparation and a fair and efficient distribution of burdens in a legal order. In this vein, air traffic management (ATM) is addressed as a case study, which shows the main issues and the gaps that liability rules face when dealing with the trade off between risk and safety as conveyed by technology.

After having clarified the nature of the relations between risk and liability on the one hand, and automation and liability on the other hand, this article analyses liability issues in the framework of ATM by approaching this topic in a comparative way between the National Airspace System (NAS) of the United States of America (USA) and the Single European Sky (SES) of the European Union (EU).

Once more, while facing an analogous risk phenomenon affecting their predominantly homogeneous societal and economic interests, the two sides of the Atlantic seem to adopt diverging stances. Amid the publication of several new studies and a set of EFSA scientific opinions linking the use of the world's most widely used pesticides to bee decline, the European Union adopted a temporary ban on their use. While the Commission does not expressly rely on it, its restrictive decision is clearly based on the controversial precautionary principle. Yet, as it is discussed in this article, the conformity of this decision with the requirements that determine the legal invocation of this principle remains doubtful.

This paper argues that the EU Regulation of credit rating agencies is concurrently pursuing two objectives that conflict with and would undermine each other. One is the objective of enhancing rating accuracy, and the other is the objective of restoring market discipline in the wholesale investment markets for credit ratings as information goods. The Regulation places more emphasis on regulating for rating accuracy which has the effect of instituting a form of product regulation for credit ratings, raising the public interest profile of credit ratings. This paper argues that this is undesirable and is contrary to policy-makers’ endeavours to enhance market discipline for rating quality and the private accountability of credit rating agencies. EU policy-makers would eventually need to confront the underlying conflicting objectives in the Regulation so that a normatively coherent and consistent regulatory regime can be designed and implemented.

There are two prominent motivations for why governments seek to promote the electric car: risk management and industrial policy. This article provides operational definitions of these two motivations and uses them to characterize the public policies of six political jurisdictions: California, China, the European Union, France, Germany, and the United States. The article finds that while the European Union is focused primarily on risk management, China, Germany and the United States are primarily engaged in industrial policy. California and France are intermediate cases with a substantial blend of industrial policy and risk management. Future research into the ramifications of industrial policy for liberalized international trade is recommended.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss how to regulate the access to and use of biochemical and human genetic material currently considered as part of the market framework. Looking beyond the protection of traditional public goods (such as land or water), the paper emphasizes the debate around the progressive commodification of human genetic resources facilitated by an improper use of intellectual property rights. The discourse around commons is used to evaluate alternative tools and strategies to the issue of private appropriation of human genetic resources and natural compounds

Private law in Europe has undergone a significant transformation during the last two decades. From a branch of law that was scarcely affected by EU legislation, it has become the object of considerable harmonisation measures to facilitate free trade and protect European citizens. Simultaneously, there has been an increased attention for ‘better regulation’ in the EU. The efforts of the European Commission to improve regulatory quality and to reduce administrative burdens for industry have promoted a regulatory environment in which formal intervention is more limited and self–regulation and co–regulation have emerged as alternatives. The University of Maastricht organized a workshop on ‘Smart Regulation of European Private Law’ in January 2013 with the aim to assess how the Smart Regulation agenda has shaped/can shape European private law; investigate the contribution of different methodological approaches to achieve ‘smart regulation’; and explore opportunities and threats for European private law, in particular in respect with developments in self–regulation and co–regulation. This report shortly summarises the discussions.

The closure of part of European airspace as a result of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano constitutes “extraordinary circumstances” which does not release air carriers from their obligation, in the event of cancellation of a flight, to provide passengers care and assistance (author's headnote).

The Politics of Precaution by David Vogel, and the edited volume, The Reality of Precaution each compare the United States with Europe over a range of regulatory areas. Vogel claims that the US and Europe changed places in recent years with Europe becoming more precautionary than the US. The edited volume covers a wider range of topics and finds that the results are mixed. The evidence of diversity in the edited volume appears convincing, but this essay argues that both volumes too narrowly focus on the precautionary principle. Rather it argues for a broader context that confronts precaution both with the proportionality principle, which is a mainstay of European Union law, and with the limitations of cost/benefit analysis and Impact Assessment. It unpacks the normative underpinnings of these concepts to suggest a broader frame for policy analysis.