Personalised nutrition, the tailoring of nutrition products, services or advice to individual characteristics such as genetics, phenotype, nutritional intake and/or exercise routine, is increasingly attracting the interest of industry, consumers and researchers. This article provides an overview of the current European Union (EU) regulatory framework as applying to personalised nutrition and draws attention to the important role of EU food law in the regulation of this innovative approach to nutrition. It is argued that personalised nutrition challenges the regulatory borderline between health and lifestyle products or services and, furthermore, also pushes the boundaries of current food safety and health claims legislation.

In several ways, the revelations that Volkswagen used software to cheat on vehicle emissions tests echo common threads of greenwashing cases against car manufacturers. However, in one significant respect, the Volkswagen scandal is much more than just another example of greenwashing. That is, the German automaker's use of software to deceive brings a novel technological aspect to greenwashing. This article discusses the Volkswagen scandal in the context of automobile greenwashing cases and highlights this newhigh-tech greenwashing.

In the coming few decades, the world is facing three related problems.

First, agriculture contributes to climate change to a considerable extent. In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC's Working Group III concludes that the AFOLU sector (agriculture, forestry and other land use) is responsible for just under a quarter (∼10 – 12 GtCO2eq/yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions. Usually, a distinction is made between non-CO2 emissions, in particular methane (NH4) emitted by livestock and rice cultivation, and nitrous oxide (N2O) caused by the use of synthetic fertilizers and the application of manure on soils and pasture. Methane and Nitrous oxide have 25 times and 300 times stronger impact on the climate than CO2 respectively. CO2 emissions from agriculture are mainly caused by deforestation and peatland drainage. Emissions from agriculture have been rising on a yearly basis since 1990, although with important regional differences (they went down in Europe and up in Asia).

This article proposes and discusses the text of a Framework Convention on Alcohol Control, which would serve public health and welfare interests. The history of alcohol’s omission from current drug treaties is briefly discussed. The paper spells out what should be covered in the treaty, using text adapted primarily from the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, but for the control of trade from the 1961 narcotic drugs treaty. While the draft provides for the treaty to be negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization, other auspices are possible. Excluding alcohol industry interests from the negotiation of the treaty is noted as an important precondition. The articles in the draft treaty and their purposes are briefly described, and the divergences from the tobacco treaty are described and justified. The text of the draft treaty is provided as Supplementary Material. Specification of concrete provisions in a draft convention points the way towards more effective global actions and agreements on alcohol control, whatever form they take.

Amid the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there has been a call to use innovative digital tools for the purpose of protecting public health. There are a number of proposals to embed digital solutions into the regulatory strategies adopted by public authorities to control the spread of the coronavirus more effectively. They range from algorithms to detect population movements by using telecommunications data to the use of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing power to detect patterns in the spread of the virus. However, the use of a mobile phone application for contact tracing is certainly the most popular.

The European Commission's (Commission) Better Regulation Strategy (BRS) is the major guideline for the Commission to assess legislation. It draws on regulatory impact assessment (RIA) via cost–benefit analysis (CBA), expert advice, and simplification in EU law–making. Yet, the practice of RIA by the Commission as well as in EU member states, while unavoidably incomplete, has shown avoidable shortcomings. The Commission's New Better Regulation Strategy of 2015 (NBRS) contains language that appears to address these shortcomings. If pursued consequentially, it would require an approach that resembles what has been called responsive behavioural regulation. At the same time, global initiatives from inter alia the World Bank emerge to include behavioural insights into policy analysis in the form of responsive regulation. This piece assesses potential models of RIA that can help to articulate the behavioural assumptions which are implied by NBRS as enshrined in the policy document “Better regulation for better results”. The methodological implications of the NBRS require a significant departure from the reliance on classical CBA, which is characteristic for the previous “Better Regulation” documents submitted by the Commission and which we term Old Better Regulation Strategy (OBRS).

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) is the main (voluntary) process through which companies can assess and address negative human rights impacts. In recent years, however, mandatory HRDD requirements are increasingly seen as a more effective way to persuade more companies to better address human rights risks in their global value chains (GVCs). This study investigates whether such mandatory legislative initiatives can positively impact workers’ rights in GVCs as an essential part of those human rights that should be addressed in HRDD. The study provides an in-depth analysis of the legal framework of workers’ rights in GVCs. It then uses the French vigilance law as a case study to empirically investigate the effects of a mandatory HRDD duty for companies using a simple difference-in-differences analysis with data from the Refinitiv database from 2014 to 2020. The study shows that there are indications that the French vigilance law positively impacts corporate human rights conduct. This finding particularly holds for the practices of companies that can be considered “laggards”, which can imply that legislators need to increase the mandatory requirements to further improve responsible corporate conduct.

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.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“TTIP”) has been hailed as an opportunity for the world's two largest consumer markets to expand inter- regional trade, investment and jobs, and to secure greater regulatory convergence that could considerably reduce costly and market-distorting extra-territorial non-tariff regulatory trade barriers. As fears of potential adverse effects on the World Trade Organization’s multilateral trading system have abated after the Doha round stalled, the initiation of the TTIP has been welcomed by the business communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Notwithstanding the anticipated benefits, questions arise with respect to both the way the negotiations are conducted and the topics covered. The TTIP negotiating mandate covers three main elements: (i) market access, (ii) regulatory convergence, and (iii) trade rules addressing shared global challenges.

This article focuses on the use and regulation of eight toxic pesticides in agricultural production in China. The pesticides are bifenthrin, chlorpyrifus, diazinon, dimethoate, methidathion, omethoate, phosmet and phosphamidon. These pesticides pose widely recognised public health risks in China. So far as we know, the article is the first article in English ever to treat these pesticides systematically from the standpoint of the regulation of risks to human beings and to the environment. Adopting perspectives from public health, economic sociology and law, the article considers the principal characteristics of these pesticides, the main health risks associated with their use in agricultural production and how these pesticides in agricultural production are currently regulated in Chinese law. It identifies a series of policy implications and makes specific policy recommendations concerning risk regulation of these eight pesticides.

In this editorial article, we aim to map out the central features of algorithmic regulation and its conceptual basis – seeking to bring together different strands of the literature relating to the topic that have often remained apart. We then reflect on the ways through which algorithmic law could evolve to address the challenges of artificial intelligence in the legal domain, particularly by examining the potential of applying a “prudential” test in order to determine whether automated decision-making systems are suitable to adequately support legal decision-making.

In this article, we present some major lessons drawn from a recently completed research project. Our research dealt with ex ante evaluation, mainly impact assessment (IA).We shed new light on research questions about the control of bureaucracy, the role of IA in decisionmaking, economics and policy learning, and the narrative dimension of appraisal.We identify how our findings stand in relation to conventional arguments about these issues, and reflect on their normative implications. We finally reason on the possible extensions of our arguments to the wider field of policy evaluation, connecting IA and ex post evaluation.

As a volcano refugee in Frankfurt, it was rather interesting to see a slow motion regulatory science disaster taking place. On April 14 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted sending millions of tons of ash into the upper atmosphere. The ash cloud, blown by the prevailing winds, moved down over northern Europe. European air traffic authorities, following well established and widely published safety protocols, began shutting down the air transport system due to the well known hazard of volcano ash. The shutdown lasted 6 days and soon became an unequal political contest between airline money on the one side and regulatory science on the other. In a classic case of shooting the messenger bringing bad news the responsible airline parties tried to shift the blame for shutdown to the regulators, while nervous governments quailed before the bullying of the airline executives.

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.

This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.

Although scholars have described and commented on the European New Approach to standardisation principles, they have paid much less attention to the ways in which this innovative process and its follow-on, i.e. the Global Approach, have been implemented. In many cases, this comes through the day-to-day activity of a very specific population of European experts, the notified bodies. Notified bodies, whose role it is to certify that products, for a given sector, comply with the essential safety requirements set out in the corresponding directive, originate from the Member States, but also compete against each other within a European certification market. This article examines the technical and political difficulties encountered by the Commission and the Member States in ensuring both the independence and the competences of these certifiers. It describes and questions the organisational architecture devised in response to these problems.

At the end of August 2014, scientists and policymakers from forty-eight countries gathered at the Heritage Hotel in Auckland, New Zealand to debate the science and art of scientific advice. Jointly hosted by Sir Peter Gluckman, chief scientific advisor to the PrimeMinister of NewZealand, and the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Auckland summit was the largest ever meeting of its kind, attracting science advisors, advisory bodies and academic experts fromAlbania to Zimbabwe, and a host of countries in between.

Over two days of intense discussion, participants debated structures and methods for the provision of scientific advice in emergency situations, across national and disciplinary boundaries, and on contested topics,where science, values and politics collide. The meeting ended with a call to strengthen collaboration between advisory systems, an agreement to formalize the network, and a commitment tomeet again in 2016. As Sir Peter Gluckman said afterwards: “Our goal was to start a global conversation on the practices and challenges of conveying science advice to governments…The meeting has highlighted a real thirst among practitioners to share models and lessons.”

Recent calls for transparency targeted towards regulatory bodies such as the US Food and Drug Administration has prompted investigation into the indubitable adoption of such measures. Specifically, the FDA's quarterly postings of AERS (Adverse Event Reporting System) signals on its CDER (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) website, stemming from FDAAA legislation introduced in September 2007, is analysed from a risk perception and communication perspective. This paper consists of two qualitative studies examining public perceptions and subsequent reported behaviour related to increased transparency. Interviews were conducted on two separate samples of seventy respondents in both Pittsburgh and New York City. The results found that signals postings may prove counter productive in terms of increased public alarm and early or inappropriate termination of a drug appearing on the list. We also found communication from the FDA perceived as inaccessible or confusing, particularly that the AERS signals are posted strictly on the web, while the majority of our respondents cited their primary and secondary media sources as broadcast television. We recommend that the FDA reconsider its communication strategy of AERS to the public as it may prove to be a ‘transparency step too far.’