On 08 October 2013, the General Court of the European Union (hereinafter General Court) delivered a judgment based on the Aarhus Regulation 1367/2006 on the access to information on substances under plant protection law, which attracted considerable attention among experts with conflicting response from environmental associations and industry. The judgment – still appealable at the time this article was written – would in case of becoming unappealable result in extensive limitations to the protection of commercial and industrial secrets under plant protection law, but additionally also generally under substance law. The following article analyses the content of the decision.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has received considerable academic attention for its newly acquired regulatory powers and the issues of legitimacy and controls concerning its far-reaching powers. ESMA's supervisory tasks are not less impressive but they are underinvestigated. In light of the recent English judgment on the exercise of ESMA's inspection powers in the UK, this article focuses on the question of judicial control over inspection power of ESMA. It shows that judicial control has been established in principle. However, the existing legal framework based on different national procedures allows ESMA escaping judicial control by chance or on purpose. This article argues for the necessity of addressing the identified controlling gap by, for instance, eliminating the differences or conditioning inspection-related discretion and promoting judicial cooperation. Since EU and national enforcement powers have become increasingly shared, the system of control cannot remain completely separated, as it is the case today. How the EU supervisor is to be controlled should not be up to the EU supervisor to choose.

At a time when policy makers want to change the behaviour of citizens to tackle a broad range of social problems, such as climate change, excessive drinking, obesity and crime, a promising new policy approach has appeared that seems capable of escaping the liberal reservations typically associated with all forms of regulatory action. After having relied on the assumption that governments can only change people's behaviour through rules and regulations, policy makers now seem ready to design policies that better reflect how people really behave, not how they are assumed to behave as rational agents. The approach, which stems from the increasingly ubiquitous findings of behavioural research, is generally captured under the evocative concept of ‘nudge’. Inspired by ‘libertarian paternalism’, it suggests that the goal of public policies should be to steer citizens towards making positive decisions as individuals and for society while preserving individual choice. Acting as ‘choice architects’ policy makers organize the context, process and environment in which individuals make decisions. In so doing, they exploit some patterns of irrationality, often called ‘cognitive biases’, to manipulate people's choices. Thus, in the famous Cafeteria example, the school's management might try to affect students’ diet by rearranging the display of food to make it more likely that students will choose the healthy option. This innovative approach to policy making is part of a broader shift from traditional regulation to regulatory governance that is generally referred to as New Governance.

The rise of the sharing economy is transforming the way we produce and consume goods and services. This transformation requires a revision of current legal rules concerning sectors where the sharing economy is emerging. Taking the regulation of the taxi industry as a main example, this article analyses why those rules ought to be reviewed, the obstacles law makers have to face in order to perform such a task, and the regulatory strategies they could use for that purpose. The paper considers a variety of regulatory approaches including regulatory impact assessment, legal variation, the coexistence of different legal regimes, experimental legislation and compensation.

This report identifies the risk and regulatory factors that influence location decisions by research-based pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies. The primary data are from interviews with 34 senior executives representing 14 research-based pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies. These interviews provided qualitative information on the particular factors that matter and their relative importance in selecting a host country for an investment. The specific factors that influence the general willingness of companies to invest in a particular country are: industry history, the incremental nature of investments, stability, structure of the pharmaceutical marketplace, access to leading scientists and physicians, adequate supply of skilled workers, sufficient patient population for clinical trials, tax policy, and transport links both within the region served and to global headquarters.

The recently enacted Directive 2015/412 is a long waited piece of legislation. This legislation introduces a new provision in Directive 2001/18, Art. 26 b, which gives Member States the regulatory freedom to decide whether genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”) should be cultivated or not in their territory. One month after the publication of this act in the Official Journal of the EU, the Commission issued a Communication in which it illustrates further legislative changes to the legislation on genetically modified food and feed (“GM food and feed”). On the same day, the Commission has tabled a proposal for a Regulation, amending Regulation 1829/2003 (the “proposed reform of GM food and feed”) that envisages the possibility for the Member States to restrict or prohibit the use of GM food and feed on their territory. The proposed act is described as a complement to Directive 2015/412 and is inspired by the same principles.

This study focuses on the Icesave dispute and Icesave agreements between Iceland, the UK and The Netherlands in the light of European law (EU and EEA law) and explores two main issues: 1) the State liability for breaches of EU/EEA law on the basis of Directive 94/19/EC following a systemic bank collapse in Iceland; and 2) the principle of non-discriminatory interplay between the nationalisation of Icelandic banks (State aid) and the payment of the minimum guarantee of €20.887 to depositors of Icesave accounts in the branches of Landsbanki in the UK and The Netherlands. This dispute was handled through diplomatic negotiations. The author is highly critical of the methodology followed. This cross-border dispute brought to light new complex problems in a grey area of European law which should have been brought before the highest European courts. Icesave also seems to have turned Icelanders against the process of European integration and the EU.

The infringement process contained in Article 258 TFEU requires the Commission, as guardian of the treaties, to monitor the performance of member states in relation to the implementation and application of EU norms. As the Commission carries out this duty it amasses enormous amounts of data on the realisation of policy objectives through its discovery of (non) implementation of EU norms and the administrative operation of its ‘compliance promoting tools’. This article explores the Commission's duty as guardian of the treaties through the lens of smart regulation and examines the potential for infringement data, and the infringement process more widely, to play a contributory role in executing meaningful evaluation in the policy cycle. The article will explore the extent to which the Commission has included infringement data as part of its policy cycle and in particular the evaluation process. It considers the multiple dimensions of accountability and institutional learning associated with evaluations and how these might be supported by the infringement mechanism. It argues that the infringement process and evaluations can be considered symbiotic with each process contributing to the accountability and institutional learning of the other.

Recognising the importance of science to climate policies, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (the ‘Paris Agreement’ or ‘Agreement’) stipulates that ‘an effective and progressive response to the urgent threat of climate change’ should be based on ‘the best available scientific knowledge.’ The terms ‘best available scientific knowledge’ or ‘best available science’ are used in several places throughout the agreement.

This section is devoted to giving readers an inside view of the crossing point between intellectual property (IP) law and risk regulation. In addition to updating readers on the latest developments in IP law and policies in technological fields (including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, agriculture and foodstuffs), the section aims at verifying whether such laws and policies really stimulate scientific and technical progress and are capable of minimising the risks posed by on-going industrial developments to individuals’ health and safety, inter alia.