Regulating New Technologies: EU Internal Market Law, Risk, and Socio-Technical Order
Mark Leslie Flear · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017
The chapter argues that, more than playing catch up with and being determined by technoscientific innovation, law also plays a leading role in the regulation of new technologies by shaping and directing the conditions of possibility for their development and market availability. The chapter charts some of the main ways in which EU internal market law retains its regulatory capacity and efficacy through techniques of negative and positive integration. These techniques centralize the harms or hazards relating to product safety as ‘the’ risks posed by new technologies. Designing regulation and limiting ‘risk’ (through it) marginalizes and obscures other kinds of harms or hazards to which it might pertain. The current regulatory design also depoliticizes, naturalizes, and quells contestation around the approach taken and obscures other potential framings of regulation, such as by human rights and bioethics.