Despite robust evidence on the benefits of gum mastication as compared to its risks, places such as Singapore still outlaw chewing gum outside of medicinal purposes. Chewing gum has therapeutic and cognitive benefits such as reduced stress and increased attention, and its associated costs such as littering are disproportionately upheld and still prosecuted against in Singapore. This is a clear example of a policy implemented based on perception rather than cost–benefit analysis. Policies, even as minor as those related to gum mastication, must be entrenched in evidence, and any accompanying costs (eg littering) can and should be deterred through evidence-based communication efforts.

In November 2010, 171 Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) unanimously adopted the Punta del Este Declaration on implementation of the Convention. The Declaration follows the filing of an international investment claim against Uruguay by Philip Morris Products (Switzerland) and related companies. The Declaration reaffirms the commitment of the 171 WHO FCTC Parties to implementation of the Convention and addresses the relationship between the WHO FCTC and international trade and investment agreements, particularly in the context of intellectual property rights. This article outlines the Request for Arbitration, sets out the Declaration and the broader normative context in which it arose before touching briefly on the implications of the Declaration.

Socioeconomic disadvantages are amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. Public actions and omissions severely affect the poor, alongside their precarious living, health and working conditions. As we slowly prepare for the aftermath of the pandemic, thanks to the progression of vaccination, especially in developed countries, certain measures taken in this context, more specifically the “vaccination certificates”, are likely particularly to affect the poor, who usually also belong to other vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities or single parents, and could eventually constitute for them a state of permanent quarantine. In this contribution, I argue that COVID-19 vaccination certificates are a slippery slope towards exclusion and stigmatisation of the poor through a bureaucratic system based on privileges that raises important questions in light of the fundamental rights of the people who reside at society’s margins, struggling to conform to the “phantom of normalcy”.

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).

In May 2011, the illegal use of the plasticizer di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate in clouding agents for use in foods and beverages was reported in Taiwan. This food scandal has caused shock and panic among the majority of Taiwanese people and has attracted international attention raising once again concern regarding the contamination of food by chemical toxic compounds. However, although these accidents cause a lot of concern, it is worth remembering that governments throughout the world are intensifying their efforts to improve food safety. In Europe in particular, food policy is based on high safety standards, aimed to protect and promote consumers’ health. EU legislation specifies that food containing a level of contaminants that is unacceptable from a public health viewpoint, cannot be put on the market.

Currently, one of the great challenges in food safety is the control of risks associated with mixtures of contaminants, which are constantly changing. Food may be contaminated by chemical substances through production practices, packaging, transport, or storage. The contamination might also result from environmental pollution through contaminated air, water, soil, and accumulation in the food chain. Among the most prominent groups of emerging food contaminants, those from industrial sources (perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and, partially, nanomaterials) cause particular concern. Many of these can be associated with severe damage to human health, for example some are suspected to be cancer promoters. Other compounds have been associated with endocrine disruptor effects, or can be accumulated and biomagnified through the food chain.

C-547/14 Philip Morris Brands SARL and Others v Secretary of State for Health [2016] (not yet reported)

C-477/14 Pillbox 38 (UK) Ltd v Secretary of State for Health [2016] (not yet reported)

C-358/14 Poland v. Parliament and Council [2016] (not yet reported)

Article 114 TFEU provides an adequate legal basis for the adoption of the Tobacco Products Directive 2014 in full, including measures relating to flavoured tobacco, labelling and packaging, and electronic cigarettes. These measures also comply with the principles of proportionality, subsidiarity, legal certainty, equal treatment and free competition, and the rights of companies under the EU Charter. Member States may introduce further requirements in relation to packaging of tobacco products that are not harmonised by the Directive.

Case C-658/11, European Parliament v Council of the European Union [2014] (not yet reported)

CFSP acts can be challenged before the Courtwhen the arguments relate to procedural points outside of the CFSP articles in Title V TEU. The Court can annul Council CFSP acts when the proper notification procedures to the Parliament stemming from Article 218 TFEU have not been followed. The effects of CFSP acts can remain in place, even after the Court annuls them, until such a time when the act has been replaced.

This article further develops the concept of algorithmic vulnerability. The analysis is built on empirical evidence of the Chinese Health Code System (HCS), compared to similar plans for the “COVID-19 Certificate” in the European Union (EU). Implementing the HCS has shown two-sided regulatory implications: improving social protection (a national strategy, a common mutual-recognition standard, scaled-up public–private cooperation) and increasing risks of social exclusion (non-digital and digital forms of vulnerability). This article argues that algorithmic vulnerability is caused by mismatches between biased databases, unfairly pre-designed algorithms and dynamically changed risk groups in reality in the context of COVID-19 vaccination. It contributes a framework for deploying plans for digital certificates in the EU concerning minimising the social risks associated with algorithmic vulnerability. The framework consists of (1) reinforcing existing vulnerability inherited from non-digital society (eg caused by intersectional factors of race/ethnicity, gender, age and health) and (2) introducing new forms of vulnerability generated by algorithm design and implementation (eg excluding the risk groups of individuals who are un/mis/overrepresented in the databases, such as those defined by nationality plus COVID-19 status).

I use the examples of medical devices, clinical trials and health data, to look at the framing of harm through the language of technological risk and failure. Across the examples, there is little or no suggestion of failure by those formally responsible. Failure is seen as arising when harm becomes refracted through calculative techniques and judgments, and reaches a point where the expectations of safety built into technological framings of regulation are thwarted. Technological framings may marginalise the contribution patients, research participants and others can make to regulation, which may in turn underlie harm and lead to the construction of failure. This marginalisation may amount to epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice and its link to failure, which has normative weight over and above harm, can present a risk to organisational standing and reputation. This risk can be used to improve the knowledge base to include stakeholder knowledges of harm, and to widen responsibilities and accountabilities. This promises to allow regulation to better anticipate and prevent harm and failure, and improve the efficacy and legitimacy of the health research enterprise.

The EU is continuously developing strategies, policies and regulations to confront pandemic and epidemic diseases. The actions of the EU in this field do not happen in a vacuum but are instead embedded in a complex international and transnational network. This article suggests the existence of a tension between public health policy and a twofold set of competing considerations: growing security concerns and market pressures. To structure the argument the article examines three distinct but related aspects: first, it clarifies the different levels of decision-making impacting on the EU’s policy and regulation of vaccines for PEDs: these levels are described as international, transnational and domestic, and the key players involved at each level are also identified; second, it analyses levels of responsiveness to and preparedness for outbreaks and analyses how past experiences have oriented the policy debate; third, it discusses issues of accountability of vaccine developers, authorising authorities and rule-makers involved in preparedness and response to emerging PEDs.

This article analyses how emergency legislation has affected law-making and regulatory quality principles (RQPs) before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) from stakeholders’ perspectives. It takes Slovakia as a case study, as this country was considered a high performer in the adoption of RQPs before the crisis, while empirical findings suggest a subsequent decline in their use. We argue that formal RQPs are not deeply embedded and are vulnerable to crises. In doing so, we conceptually distinguish between standard (fully following the RQPs), emergency (modified to accommodate crisis) and non-standard law-making (violating formal rules and the RQPs). In the transition from a crisis to a post-crisis context, the deployment of both emergency and non-standard law-making has become relatively permanent without proper justification having been provided. This reinforces the notion that RQPs and governance legitimacy became less important for the executive than in the pre-crisis period and emergency and non-standard regulatory law-making became institutionalised as new norms of swift law-making. All of these factors prevent stakeholders from being informed and from engaging in deliberation, which jeopardises the legitimacy of post-crisis law-making governance.

The European Union (EU) increasingly develops and implements policies infused with salient and sometimes conflicting values – for instance, in migration and criminal law cooperation. However, policy implementation studies have not frequently considered how such complex value trade-offs may affect practical implementation within Member States. This article therefore quantitatively and temporally examines the practical implementation of an EU flagship criminal law measure: the simplified extradition system known as the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Using data on EAWs decided upon by the Dutch Amsterdam District Court, we test the impact of value trade-offs by examining whether (newly introduced) safeguards for the protection of requested persons adversely affect system efficiency (measured through case turnover times). The results suggest that the design of legal tests and adjustments made to the EAW system over time through the Court of Justice of the European Union affect the balance between fundamental rights protection and efficiency in the practical implementation of the EAW.

The dialectic between the technically (or scientifically) possible and the legally possible, which is implied in decision-making in conditions of uncertainty, raises crucial issues from a constitutional perspective. In particular, the emergence of a new factor of legitimacy – which could be envisaged as a form of “scientific legitimacy” – can be detected and needs to be integrated within the constitutional discourse.

Through an overview of the case law of the Italian Constitutional court, the paper aims at highlighting the possible approaches to the need of a deeper integration of technical and scientific knowledge within the public decision-making processes, in an attempt to strike a balance capable of avoiding the two extremes of scientifically weak decisions on one hand, and of “technical deference” to experts on the other.