European Law and New Health Technologies: The Research Agenda

Maps the research agenda that underpinned the edited collection 'European Law and New Health Technologies', that this pieces introduces.

European Law and New Health Technologies ESRC End of Award Report, RES-451-26-0764

End of award report for the funded research seminar series of the same name.

European Law and New Health Technologies

Health is a matter of fundamental importance in European societies, both as a human right in itself, and as a factor in a productive workforce and therefore a healthy economy. New health technologies promise improved quality of life for patients suffering from a range of diseases, and the potential for the prevention of incidence of disease in the future. At the same time, new health technologies pose significant challenges for governments, particularly in relation to ensuring the technologies are safe, effective, and provide appropriate value for (public) money.

To guard against the possible dangers arising from new health technologies, and to maximize the benefits, all European governments regulate their development, marketing, and public financing. In addition, several international institutions operating at European level, in particular the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the European Patent Office, have become involved in the regulation of new health technologies. They have done so both through traditional 'command and control' legal measures, and through other regulatory mechanisms, including guidelines, soft law, 'steering' through redistribution of resources, and private or quasi-private regulation.

This collection analyses European law and its relationships with new health technologies. It uses interdisciplinary insights, particularly from law but also drawing on regulation theory, and science and technology studies, to shed new light on some of the key defining features of the relationships and especially the roles of risk, rights, ethics, and markets. The collection explores the way in which European law's engagement with new health technologies is to be legitimized, and discusses the implications for biological or biomedical citizenship.

‘Symposium: New Technologies, European Law and Citizens’

This special issue seeks to draw attention to the relations between new technologies and European law (encompassing EU law and the law of the Council of Europe and its institutions), and some of the implications for citizens.

Review: V. Gessner and D. Nelken (eds.), European Ways of Law (Hart, 2008)

Review of edited collection.

Review: G. De Búrca and J. Scott (eds.), Law and New Governance in the EU and the US (Hart, 2006)

Review of edited collection.

Review: M. Dougan and E. Spaventa (eds.), Social Welfare and EU Law (Hart, 2005)

Review of edited collection.

A Novel Method to Enable Trade-offs Across the Whole Product Life of an Aircraft Using Value Driven Design

The increasing need to understand complex products and systems with long life spans, presents a significant challenge to designers who increasingly require a broader understanding of the operational aspects of the system. This demands an evolution in current design practice, as designers are often constrained to provide a subsystem solution without full knowledge of the global system operation. Recently there has been a push to consider value centric approaches which should facilitate better or more rapid convergence to design solutions with predictable completion schedules. Value Driven Design is one such approach, in which value is used as the system top level objective function. This provides a broader view of the system and enables all sub-systems and components to be designed with a view to the effect on project value. It also has the capacity to include value expressions for more qualitative aspects, such as environmental impact. However, application of the method to date has been restricted to comparing value in a programme where the lifespan is fixed and known a priori. This paper takes a novel view of value driven design through the surplus value objective function, and shows how it can be used to identify key sensitivities to guide designers in design trade-off decisions. By considering a new time based approach it can be used to identify optimum programme life-span and hence allow trade-offs over the whole product life.

Export Cartels: Is it Legal to Target your Neighbour? Analysis in Light of Recent Case Law

Despite the growing sophistication of antitrust regimes around the world, export cartels benefit from special treatment: they are almost universally tolerated, if not encouraged in the countries of origin. Economists do not offer an unambiguous policy recommendation on how to deal with them in part due to the lack of empirical data. This article discusses arguments for and against export cartels and it identifies the existing gaps in the present regulatory framework. The theoretical part is followed by an analysis of the recent case law: a US cartel challenged with different outcomes in India and South Africa, as well as Chinese export cartels pursued in the USA. The Chinese cases are particularly topical as the conduct at stake, apart from being subject to private antitrust actions before US courts, was also challenged within the WTO dispute settlement framework, pointing out to the existing interface between trade and competition. While the recent developments prove that unaddressed issues tend not to vanish, the new South-North dimension has the potential of placing export cartels again on the international agenda. Pragmatic thinking suggests looking for the solution within the WTO framework.