Search Results

This chapter discusses the Commission's practice of establishing groups composed of member state experts on implementation. The groups are established on an ad hoc basis and their aim is to identify and clarify issues of interpretation of directives. The chapter is organized as follows: The first section discusses some of the limitations of the general EU infringement procedure and the merits of peer-review from an enforcement viewpoint. Against this background, it looks at implementation expert groups and more specifically at the expert group dealing with the Free Movement Directive. It proceeds to problematize the Commission's turn towards management of compliance through implementation expert groups, arguing that the method may obfuscate the fact that enforcement is also about contested norms. The final section examines Article 70 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. This provision was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and provides express legal basis for peer-review. Albeit not concerned with directives specifically, the provision addresses some of the general issues discussed in the chapter concerning peer-review.

This chapter focuses on one highly important factor impacting the policy choices for Europe: expert groups that advise the Commission in legislative drafting. While the involvement of expert groups is often seen as an embodiment of technocratic decision-making, the quantitative development over time and the distribution across Commission services suggest that expert groups are valued beyond their mere provision of factual expertise. The case studies reveal a strong impact of expert consultancy on the Commission’s internal drafting process. But although expert groups are most often used for the provision of knowledge, they are also often a strategic tool to substantiate political choices or to build consensus in the wider context of EU decision-making. Thus, in the Commission’s usage of expert groups we can observe a co-existence of technocratic and more political rationales.

Chapter 6 outlines the ongoing activities taking place in the debate about European contract law and their bearing on the constitutional dimensions of European contract law. These activities comprise three main components: the Common Frame of Reference (CFR) project, the Commission’s plans for the review of the consumer acquis leading to the adoption of the Consumer Rights Directive, and the possible enactment of one or more optional instruments of contract law and the promotion of EU model contract terms, which has recently reached a crucial culmination stage with the Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on a Common European Sales Law (proposed CESL).

From the beginning, European policymakers have recognized that market integration can undermine the policy autonomy of member states and the relative power of labour. For this reason, it was important to balance the need for democratic accountability and macroeconomic stabilization against the promised efficiency gains from market integration. In the immediate post-war period, policymakers agreed to limit the nature of market integration to ensure that elected officials would have the tools they needed to stabilize their local labour markets. This chapter examines three early and influential debates to show us how policymakers in the 1950s faced the same trade-off that we face today (local democratic accountability vs overall efficiency) – but prioritized very differently.

This chapter examines the work of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in relation to human-subjects protections. It suggests that the leadership of the NIH on this front can be understood as an effort to deflect lawsuits away from Bethesda and toward other research sites. It also discusses the role of the NIH in creating the so-called expert groups and in the leading spread of human-subjects review committees to research institutions across the U.S. and abroad.

The Right to Fair compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 introduces and places great reliance on the conduct of a Social Impact Assessment. This chapter explains and deconstructs the process by explaining how it was arrived at and how it is to be implemented.

The provisions governing the euro as ‘European Single Currency’ are at the core of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s (TFEU) rules on the Economic Monetary Union (EMU). Since the euro has replaced the former national currencies of the participating Member States and is to substitute the national currencies of any future members of the euro area, it was mandatory to ascribe to the euro the status of exclusive ‘legal tender’ as per Article 128(1) TFEU. This status of the euro seems to be so evident as to be self-explanatory–but only at first glance since the concept of ‘legal tender’ and its implications in European Union (EU) and national private and public law are less clear. A satisfactory concept of legal tender is hard to define and hardly ever given on the EU level–resulting in a striking lack of legal certainty in a great variety of aspects of public and private law.