The primary concern of the present paper is the cost of acquiring information by judges and legislators in the process of regulating new technologies. The paper distinguishes between risky and uncertain applications of technology. A risky technology poses an obvious risk, and the problem before the regulator is one of comparing cost and benefit. We argue that the judiciary, which acquires information gratis from litigants, is better suited to the regulation of risky technologies. Uncertain technologies, on the other hand, can be harmful in ways which cannot be foreseen at the time of the technological innovation. Cost and benefit are incalculable; regulation must instead be based on subjective preferences about the degree of uncertainty that society should tolerate. Legislative law-making is designed with a view to aggregating subjective preferences. Accordingly, uncertain technologies should be regulated through statute.
This article intends to further the debate about a possible hierarchy in the implementation of human rights. To this end, it proposes a theory which may serve as a stepping stone towards the achievement of shared and well-defined priorities, taking scarcity as a starting point to analyse the implementation of human rights. The proposed theory builds on the so-called Maslow pyramid which displays a common pattern of behaviour aimed at addressing priorities based on human needs. Scrutinising its methodological principle we develop a theory based on 'instrumentality'. Although this allows for an informed ranking of human rights, it leaves the substantive importance of human rights untouched.
In this article, we study spillovers in political trust between the national parliaments of 15 Member States and the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in the period 2000–2015. We show that in most instances spillovers between the national parliaments and the European Commission and the European Parliament are bidirectional, asymmetric, and change over time and place. A corollary of these findings is that simultaneously achieving high level of trust in institutions at different levels of governance may require a deeper understanding of the complex inter-institutional relationships that exist in the EU multilevel governance setting.
Disruptive innovations provoke controversial political responses. They affect established business models and settled social norms. The question faced by society is whether and how to regulate innovation. The question grows more pressing as innovation grows more rapid. In pre-antiquity, innovation similarly engendered major changes to society. For example, improvements in irrigation technology caused whole populations to migrate to large cities in Ancient Egypt. The pace of social change was, however, comparatively slow, as was the diffusion of technology. It could take hundreds of years for a new technologysay an improvement in agricultureto spread. The resultant social pressures, even if significant, did not require wide-scale interventions into the economy. Indeed, they did not even require the formation of government. But we now live in a time of rapid change: technologies are developing fast, digital economies are emerging and markets are growing more integrated. Netflix rendered DVDs obsolete. What Netflix did to DVDs is what Uber will do to taxis. Incipient technologies, such as nanorobotics and genetic engineering, are widely forecast to revolutionise our lives. The impact of all those technologies is unknown and to some extent unknowable. In the context of that uncertainty, the role of law, legislators, courts and regulators is paramount. At its core, the concept of "disruptive innovation" refers to business models or technologies that challenge incumbent businesses, successfully targeting overlooked market segments. In common parlance, the term has begun to encompass all technological and business breakthroughs which reshape markets. Such innovations lead to a need to reassess the effectiveness of the existing legal frameworks and, if appropriate, to reform the law. The legislator faces a difficult choice: either let judges decide according to the current law, or promulgate new legislation. Although these two options may seem mutually exclusive, they also overlap. Thus, the legislator may decide to let judges decide cases according to pre-existing rules at first. Once the new dynamics are fully understood, new statutes may be drafted or old ones amended.
In times of water shortage, it becomes increasingly relevant for policymakers to understand the existing relationships between different types of water use, so as to encourage efficient water management. This article makes use of yearly data on agricultural, industrial, and household water use in the Balkan countries of Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. It does so to identify the potential interactions among these three categories of water use. Using a deterministic model based on differential equations, we provide an analysis of the interactions among these different sectors of water use for the period between 2008 and 2017. Results show that interactions among these different categories do not remain constant over periods of time, either across or within the countries analysed. We find that, for most countries, industrial and household water uses are more likely to be characterised by mutualism and competition, instead of a predator-prey relationship. Agricultural water use, on the other hand, takes on the role of predator against the other two.
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