The diagnosis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection relies on the detection of viral RNA by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) performed with respiratory specimens, especially nasopharyngeal swabs. However, this procedure requires specialized medical personnel, centralized laboratory facilities, and time to provide results (from several hours up to 1 d). In addition, there is a non-negligible risk of viral transmission for the operator who performs the procedure. For these reasons, several studies have suggested the use of other body fluids, including saliva, for the detection of SARS-CoV-2. The use of saliva as a diagnostic specimen has numerous advantages: it is easily self-collected by the patient with almost no discomfort, it does not require specialized health care personnel for its management, and it reduces the risks for the operator. In the past few months, several scientific papers, media, and companies have announced the development of new salivary tests to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection. Posterior oropharyngeal saliva should be distinguished from oral saliva, since the former is a part of respiratory secretions, while the latter is produced by the salivary glands, which are outside the respiratory tract. Saliva can be analyzed through standard (rRT-PCR) or rapid molecular biology tests (direct rRT-PCR without extraction), although, in a hospital setting, these procedures may be performed only in addition to nasopharyngeal swabs to minimize the incidence of false-negative results. Conversely, the promising role of saliva in the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection is highlighted by the emergence of point-of-care technologies and, most important, point-of-need devices. Indeed, these devices can be directly used in workplaces, airports, schools, cinemas, and shopping centers. An example is the recently described Rapid Salivary Test, an antigen test based on the lateral flow assay, which detects the presence of the virus by identifying the spike protein in the saliva within a few minutes.

Subject to conditions that public law can secure, social conflicts can be normatively appealing for their dividend in terms of dynamism, identity and stability. While this notion was key to post‐World War II European public law, it no longer holds true now that social conflicts are increasingly marginalised by the expansion of supranational law and its consensus culture. However, far from disappearing social conflicts re‐emerge as challenges to the current institutional setting, even despite the policy of constitutional gesture undertaken by EU institutions. This paper tracks the role of social conflicts in European public law and argues that as long as EU politics fails to embrace a culture of social conflicts, challenges to the authority of EU law can be normatively justified.

The article discusses the Weiss dispute from a political economy perspective. It first sets this litigation in its wider context, namely the protracted transformation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) over the last decade, a decade which has revealed the structural flaws in its design. It then briefly sketches the changing role of central banking, from a fixation on fighting inflation to a more recent focus on combating deflation. This helps to explain the problematic character of the Weiss rulings and the commentaries they have provoked, illustrating a general failure to consider the limits of law, the result of clinging to different parts of the EMU wreckage, on the assumption that the current constitutional framework remains viable. Finally, the article emphasizes the transformative potential of the Weiss saga. The judicial conflict lays bare the unsustainability of the present arrangements, and reveals the necessity of a choice between genuinely federal integration and coordinated dismantling of EMU.

Recognised and shaped by regulatory strategies pulling in different directions, the European consumer may be portrayed as a fractured subject. By drawing from the Pasta and Hormones litigation, the article investigates its multiple and heterogeneous identities as resulting from the interaction between domestic, EU and WTO law. It argues that the fractured consumer could be viewed as a realistic legal projection of the human condition of actual individuals engaging in consumer activities, and sets out an adjudicative strategy for assembling its identities at an argumentative level so as to do the best by their promises and counter their biases. The article concludes by suggesting that the conceptual framework construed around the fractured consumer could improve the transparency and contestability of adjudication and policy-making.