The purpose of this contribution is to briefly present the content of the EU–US Data Privacy Framework recently adopted by the European Commission and then to assess whether it meets the expectations expressed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its Schrems II judgment and related case law.

The proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is the first comprehensive attempt to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) in a major jurisdiction. This article analyses Article 9, the key risk management provision in the AI Act. It gives an overview of the regulatory concept behind the norm, determines its purpose and scope of application, offers a comprehensive interpretation of the specific risk management requirements and outlines ways in which the requirements can be enforced. This article can help providers of high-risk systems to comply with the requirements set out in Article 9. In addition, it can inform revisions of the current draft of the AI Act and efforts to develop harmonised standards on AI risk management.

Due to its severity, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the greatest crises to have tested the European Union’s (EU) ability to take effective action. The restrictive measures adopted by the Member States to curb its spread affected in particular the free movement of people and partly of goods. This prompted the EU to take action inter alia to maintain essential travel, protect supply chains, enhance contact tracing and facilitate the coordinated resumption of travel. Building on the notion of “output legitimacy”, this paper assesses the EU’s success in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in transport by looking at the four main initiatives between the end of 2020 and June 2022, namely: (1) the EU Digital COVID Certificates; (2) cross-border contact tracing through Passenger Locator Forms; (3) the “Green Lanes” for freight transport; and (4) the coordinated approach to facilitating safe and free movement. These initiatives are measured against the EU’s legal competence, economic interests, political pressure and the added value of EU action. While recognising the small set of cases, the results show that, although legal competence is a decisive factor for success, EU initiatives can achieve equivalent effect even in its absence, provided other conditions are met.

The Hague District Court in the Netherlands faced a novel tort law issue in 2021 in Milieudefensie et al v Royal Dutch Shell plc – namely, whether Shell is liable in tort for the reduction costs of carbon dioxide produced in the end use of energy-carrying Shell products. The civil lawsuit aims to make Shell (re)search for adequate substitutes so as to enable Shell’s customers to reduce their consumption of energy-carrying Shell products. It is argued here that Shell’s liability should be assessed within Guido Calabresi’s “cheapest cost avoider” framework.

French whistleblower legislation establishes a unified legal regime for the treatment of reports and for the protection of whistleblowers. Drawing on French whistleblower law, recently amended by the transposition of Directive 2019/1937 of 23 October 2019, this article examines whether the specific features of whistleblowing in relation to public health and environmental risks are adequately addressed by this unified regime. The article identifies four key factors for the effective handling of whistleblowing relating to public health and the environment: (1) the possibility of protecting whistleblowers who report facts gathered outside the workplace; (2) the possibility of protecting legal persons as whistleblowers; (3) the possibility of carrying out in-depth investigations to characterise the reality of the risks reported; and (4) the possibility of archiving whistleblowing in order to detect weak signals of risks over the long term. In these four areas, the article provides a nuanced diagnosis of the situation in French law and offers suggestions for improvement.

This paper provides an analysis of the legal and policy foundations of the different approaches adopted by the European Union (EU) in relation to the 2015/2016 and 2022 refugee “crises”. Its main objective is to show how a risk-based biopolitical framework can bridge the gap between EU institutional narratives and the critique of Europe’s racialised governance schemes. The two “crises” have been largely shaped by a perceived need to manage risk, yet this has produced very different institutional responses, in ways that concealed their racialised dimension. Analysing how risk has been understood in the two contexts, the paper shows how their legal and policy foundations (re-)produce a racialised differential scheme. Amidst ongoing debates on reforming EU migration and asylum law, the paper also shows how the current proposals further consolidate this scheme.

This paper critically evaluates the European Commission’s proposed AI Act’s approach to risk management and risk acceptability for high-risk artificial intelligence systems that pose risks to fundamental rights and safety. The Act aims to promote “trustworthy” AI with a proportionate regulatory burden. Its provisions on risk acceptability require residual risks from high-risk systems to be reduced or eliminated “as far as possible”, having regard for the “state of the art”. This criterion, especially if interpreted narrowly, is unworkable and promotes neither proportionate regulatory burden nor trustworthiness. By contrast, the Parliament’s most recent draft amendments to the risk management provisions introduce “reasonableness” and cost–benefit analyses and are more transparent regarding the value-laden and contextual nature of risk acceptability judgments. This paper argues that the Parliament’s approach is more workable and better balances the goals of proportionality and trustworthiness. It explains what reasonableness in risk acceptability judgments would entail, drawing on principles from negligence law and European medical devices regulation. It also contends that the approach to risk acceptability judgments needs a firm foundation of civic legitimacy, including detailed guidance or involvement from regulators and meaningful input from affected stakeholders.

Online gambling emerged in the 1990s in the midst of a process of market liberalisation. Here, scholars have argued that the gambling industry actively seeks state regulation to authorise and legitimate its activities. Why then, since the emergence of the online gambling industry, have trade associations continually sought to develop responsible gambling codes of conduct? In this paper, I address this puzzle by documenting and tracing the development and deployment of responsible gambling codes of conduct by trade associations from the emergence of the online gambling industry in the early 1990s and through processes of increased market liberalisation at the national level and market integration at the European Union level. I argue that online gambling trade associations deploy responsible gambling codes of conduct at particular moments of opportunity to shape their members’ external legal and regulatory environment and to reproduce and embed a particular understanding of how gambling-related risks should be regulated.

On 9 March 2023, the Court of Justice (Second Chamber) delivered a preliminary ruling about the coordination of two European Union measures against air pollution: the Industrial Emissions Directive and the Ambient Air Quality Directive. Upon assessment, the Court reinforced the mandatory nature of the air quality limit values vis-à-vis possible derogations foreseen in the Industrial Emissions Directive. In this case, both AG Kokott and the Second Chamber affirmed the primacy of the air quality standards. However, this Case Note finds that slightly different reasoning between the AG Opinion and the final Judgment reveals differing underlying approaches. Whilst the AG focuses on air quality plans and leaves more room for discretion to national authorities, the final Judgment anchors the coordination of the two Directives to strict and objective pollution limit values, further strengthening the Ambient Air Quality Directive as an effective instrument of environmental protection litigation.