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The goal of our paper is to demonstrate the potential effects of a tax on paying a ransom on the incentives of stakeholders involved: both the perpetrators (the attackers placing the ransomware) as well as the potential victim. We do think that there is a case for a ransom tax, but we do also realise that it is not easy to make that case, and hence we express this doubt in our title. A tax could stimulate ex ante cybersecurity and also (when price elasticity is not too low) reduce ex post ransom payments. In addition, a tax in combination with a smartly designed subsidy could have benefits.

Purpose This paper aims to draw attention to an urgent need for reform of the regulatory framework of the broader export credit system to ensure a new and comprehensive “safe haven” for officially supported export credits. The purpose is to analyse the complex debate on disciplines of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), creating a point of reference for future analysis of and debates around the “carve-out clause” of the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM) and a “safe haven” in a broader sense. Design/methodology/approach This paper takes inspiration from legal, economic and political science literature on subsidies and officially supported export credits, as well as on legal documents related to the WTO and the OECD. It examines the WTO subsidy and the OECD export credits framework, focusing on main legal and economic governance aspects. Then, it gives a critical analysis how “safe” a “safe haven” in a broader sense might be, assessing frictions of and solutions for the fundamentally different set of disciplines, limitations, financial instruments not covered by OECD regulations, as well as new challenges related to climate finance. Findings After assessing the challenges regarding the “carve-out clause” of the WTO subsidy framework and two tracks aiming to create a new “safe haven”, requirements for comprehensive disciplines for officially supported export credits are pointed out. Furthermore, several misunderstandings and mistakes appearing in the debate are clarified. Research limitations/implications Desktop research rather than empirical field work. Practical implications This paper creates awareness for governments and exporters how to deal with a complex system of interrelated disciplines. The question, how “safe” a “safe haven” in a broader sense can be, has not been resolved yet. Some authors focus on the WTO disciplines not taking into account the need for an effective matching procedure of the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits (the Arrangement). Furthermore, the introduction of several new pre-export financing programmes and the growing significance of climate finance-related instruments for export credit agencies creates both opportunities and challenges. This paper can serve as a reference point for the academic debate and further research. This paper also offers newcomers to the topic a comprehensive overview. Originality/value Although the “carve-out clause” and the Arrangement have been much discussed, there is limited literature review structuring both existing and new aspects of the debate, assessing (dis)advantages of arguments and interpretations. This paper both adds to the corpus of literature about the ASCM, as well as the Arrangement, and takes this corpus as the object of its analysis.

In digital markets, concentrated Big Data and analytical algorithms enable undertakings to predict each consumer’s willingness to pay with increasing accuracy and offer consumers personalized recommendations and tailored prices accordingly. In this context, concerns have arisen about whether and when AI-enabled price discrimination amounts to an abuse of dominance under competition law and would require a legal response. To address these concerns, this paper will analyze AI-enabled price discrimination from a comparative law and economics perspective. In economics, price discrimination is not always undesirable as it can increase static efficiency, and, on some occasions, it can promote dynamic efficiency and boost consumer welfare. Nevertheless, it may also lead to exclusionary and exploitative effects, especially once Tech Giants abuse their dominant positions in relevant markets. Since the protection of free competition and consumer welfare are objectives of competition law in China and the EU, competition law seems a proper instrument to step into digital markets to address these concerns. Indeed, the EU and China have established mixed regimes of competition law and other rules to tackle unfair and/or anti-competitive AI-enabled price discrimination. As such, AI-enabled price discrimination does not always require a competition law response and it requires competition authorities to make a trade-off between different considerations.

Tying has become a common practice in digital platforms. It may generate both pro-competitive effects and anti-competitive effects, which makes it difficult to distinguish between lawful and unlawful tying practices. The cases of Tencent and Android both involve tying conducts, but interestingly, the cases have different outcomes. This article explores reasons for these different case outcomes from a comparative law and economics perspective. By assessing the facts and legal rulings in Tencent and Android, we find that the different case outcomes result, on the one hand, from the different case facts, and on the other hand, from the different approaches used by the EU Commission and the Chinese Supreme People’s Court. The Court scores better in terms of ensuring legal certainty; nevertheless, it may face difficulties when it has to apply economic analysis. The Commission seemingly uses more economics, but the application is not full-fledged, as it disregards important case facts when assessing competition foreclosure, and employs asymmetric legal tests and evidence standards for anti/pro-competitive effects of tying. From a law and economics perspective, we provide suggestions for China and the EU, taking the recent Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on Platforms in China and the forthcoming Digital Markets Act in the EU into account.

Models of individual accountability for algorithms' actions fail when a human-algorithm association comes to be viewed as a collective actor. In some situations, human and algorithmic actions are so closely intertwined that there is no longer a linear connection between the emergent collectivity and the complex interactions of humans and algorithms. In such collective decision-making sequences, individual accountability can no longer be attributed. Therefore, a new perspective on human-algorithm associations that captures their emergent properties and organizational qualities is needed to develop appropriate models of collective accountability. This article seeks to answer a number of questions. How can the encounter between humans and algorithms within such a socio-technical configuration be adequately theorized? Can the configuration itself be understood as a hybrid collectivity? Can actions be attributed to the configuration as a personified collective actor? How will accountability be institutionalized for human-algorithm associations - in centralized or distributed collective forms?

We examined whether jurors who know that a prosecutor has a high conviction rate are more inclined to convict a defendant than jurors who know that the prosecutor has a low conviction rate. Using simulated criminal cases, we conducted two experimental studies with jury-eligible participants. Study 1 (N = 200) tested whether information about prior conviction rates (high or low) affected jurors’ estimations of the probability of guilt in the context of a robbery. Study 2 (N = 205) used another criminal trial context (murder) and another dependent variable (dichotomous guilty/not guilty verdicts). Study 2 also incorporated jury instructions on the reasonable doubt standard and included a control condition in which no information regarding the conviction rate was provided. In both studies, jurors in the high conviction rate treatment were significantly more likely to convict the accused than jurors in the low conviction rate treatment. When jurors are aware of a prosecutor's prior conviction rates, a self-reinforcing cycle may arise in which conviction rates determine conviction rates.

This article describes how the facts in social reality take an intermediate position between objective facts and purely subjective ‘facts’. In turn, these social facts can be subdivided into constructivist and non-constructivist facts. The defining difference is that non-constructivist facts are completely determined by an approximate consensus between the members of a social group, while constructivist facts are founded in such a consensus but can nevertheless be questioned. Ought fact are such constructivist facts. Because they are founded in social reality, a naturalistic theory of ought facts is attractive. Because constructivist facts are always open to questioning, we can explain why the facts in social reality may found ought facts but are nevertheless not the final word about them.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive ‘enjoys widespread support among laypersons’. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.

Private actors as non-institutional, and therefore often overlooked, participants in EU legal processes – A specific focus on their role as private regulators – Private actors such as companies, contracting parties and industry associations, play a pivotal regulatory role in the EU legal order – Classifying the existing legal research on private regulation – A legal-doctrinal approach towards private regulation also needed – Theoretical background of a novel legal-doctrinal perspective on private actors – Addressing the most pressing practical methodological challenges – Specific focus on the problem of accessibility and the difficulty of understanding and interpreting private regulation doctrinally

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially in recent years, which not only generates value but also creates risks. AI systems are characterised by their complexity, opacity and autonomy in operation. Now and in the foreseeable future, AI systems will be operating in a manner that is not fully autonomous. This signifies that providing appropriate incentives to the human parties involved is still of great importance in reducing AI-related harm. Therefore, liability rules should be adapted in such a way to provide the relevant parties with incentives to efficiently reduce the social costs of potential accidents. Relying on a law and economics approach, we address the theoretical question of what kind of liability rules should be applied to different parties along the value chain related to AI. In addition, we critically analyse the ongoing policy debates in the European Union, discussing the risk that European policymakers will fail to determine efficient liability rules with regard to different stakeholders.

Officially supported export credits matter greatly for private contracts: they provide the possibility of large export transactions and contracts which would otherwise not take place. It is therefore important to know how these instruments are regulated on an international level. The international regulation for public European export finance has three levels: rules set by the WTO to curb export subsidies, the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits (which is a gentlemen’s agreement) and the EU state aid framework. Whilst the WTO framework has an official carve-out for the Arrangement, the EU state aid regime does not. Post-Covid, this article looks at the way to proceed with regulating official export credits, and how the different levels of regulation should be applied (and when), concluding that the Arrangement should be the core text of international regulation on export credits.

This comment discusses on how legal change can originate from society and the private sphere. It argues that Hesselink’s perspective is too strongly oriented on public sphere and ignores the societal sphere including its transformative potential. The comment centres the concept of private law institutions and institutional change that is a core element in both Katharina Pistor’s diagnosis on coding of capital in law and Martijn Hesselink’s related proposal to reform private law institutions through a comprehensive principle-oriented code. The comment first introduces the idea of legal institutionalism in Pistor and Hesselink to then add to it an additional perspective from a new institutional theory that identifies the transformative potential within the social institutions themselves. It is then argued that the law, rather than being in need of radical change, needs to be radical in being responsive to the societal institutions. The contribution concludes by outlining on the basis of three examples – contract, tort and private international law – how societally responsive private law institutions can look like.

‘Green recovery’ is one of the key themes of the stimulus packages implemented around the world in response to the Covid-19-related economic downturn. Recent research points to the potential role of regulation that becomes less stringent during recessions (ie countercyclical regulation) as an instrument to stimulate a quicker recovery. When this argument is put in the context of a green recovery, two key questions arise: should we implement countercyclical environmental regulation? If yes, what environmental instruments are better suited to stimulate the economy in periods of economic downturn? This article addresses these questions by discussing the risks of countercyclical environmental regulation and comparing the countercyclical effects of two critical environmental instruments: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. The article argues that policymakers should be cautious in implementing countercyclical environmental regulation because the benefits of this practice are uncertain and it entails various risks. The article also challenges the belief common among academics and policymakers that cap-and-trade is inherently more countercyclical than carbon taxes by showing that whether this is true depends on the design of these instruments and other contingent factors.

Summary This article focuses on the references (allegations) made by the lawyers in a selected number of cases to Roman and customary law as well as to court decisions when arguing their case. The analysis focuses on three similar civil litigation records from the Court of Friesland from 1716, 1718 and 1720. Network analysis was used to examine whether certain sources were more dominant (i.e. more central) in the network than others and to explore the relationship between the references. The lawyers in the three cases from the Court of Friesland appear to have used some references in common when arguing whether security rights (i.e. mortgages) included a right of pursuit and whether the auctioneer could recover the object if the buyer failed to pay.

Mediation in the context of the enforcement of judgments and other enforceable documents should be distinguished from the broader and more general question of whether or not enforcement agents may serve as mediators. In Europe, there are some jurisdictions where enforcement agents may indeed serve as mediators. This does not necessarily mean that in these jurisdictions enforcement agents use mediation in ongoing enforcement procedures executed under their supervision (the latter is qualified as ‘post-judicial mediation’ or ‘participatory enforcement’). In actual fact, examples of post-judicial mediation are scarce or non-existent even though they are discussed in literature. As will be shown in the present contribution, ‘post-judicial mediation’ is often not conceived as mediation in the strict sense (i.e. the bringing about of an amicable settlement under the guidance of a neutral mediator), but as a series of activities aimed at providing efficient and effective enforcement services. It is often better to refer to ‘post-judicial mediation’ as ‘participator enforcement’ or ‘amicable enforcement’. Best practices in participatory enforcement are the central topic of the present contribution.

Statutory dominant firms, different from dominant firms that have gained their market power through competition on the merits, have derived their market position from choices made by the state. From an economic perspective, tying by this kind of firm typically generates significant anti-competitive effects that are likely to outweigh the possible pro-competitive effects. Both in China and the EU, such tying practices have frequently taken place. Nevertheless, the economic findings have not been fully reflected in competition provisions and competition practice in these two jurisdictions. This may lead to error costs and enforcement costs, which is detrimental to consumer welfare. It is thus important for competition authorities and courts to carefully consider the economic findings, while taking into account also the principles of proportionality and legal certainty. To enhance the effectiveness of competition law, this study proposes potential ways of applying a differentiated (stricter) scrutiny of tying by statutory dominant firms to reduce error costs and enforcement costs.

In a world of rising long-term risks and their ensuing syndromes, the mitigation and financing of long-term risks are therefore arguably some of the most critical issues facing society. However, long-term thinking involving future generations draws limited attention in current political and social systems. Private insurance has received increased attention due to its expert role in risk management and its risk transfer mechanisms, and it has played an important role in dealing with some types of long-term risk, such as floods and earthquakes. Increasingly, insurance also contributes to disaster mitigation through regulating the conduct of policyholders by creating incentives for policyholders to counter short-termism and invest in reduction measures regarding long-term risks. In addition, it has been shown that supply-side problems and behavioural anomalies make it difficult to insure against long-term risks. Innovative long-term insurance solutions and a combination of public and private partnerships are proposed to overcome these restrictions.

For a long period, China's environmental law has been dubbed a ‘paper tiger’ due to the truism that China's environmental legislation is plentiful but not properly enforced. During the past few years, there have been impressive strides made by Chinese policymakers to address the non-compliance and weak enforcement of China's environmental law. As a result, China has bolstered a toolbox approach of environmental law enforcement, which provides law enforcers with a variety of instruments to induce compliance. This article provides a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of the available mix of (public) enforcement instruments and their relative importance under the current enforcement regime of China's environmental law by taking the recent legal and policy developments into account. More particularly, we assess the de facto application of the smart mix of administrative and criminal enforcement tools in China, by conducting a law and economic analysis on the public enforcement data of China's environmental law between 2012 and 2020.

We study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep un-clarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value.

The Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) in China allows the responsible authority for merger control to consider not only the competition interest but also other public interest reasons when it reviews a takeover or merger. Where the responsible authority considers that the benefits of a takeover or merger to the public interest outweigh the harms to competition, it may ‘exempt’ the transaction. This ‘public interest exemption’ has never been formally applied since the introduction of the law in 2008. One explanation for this can be found in the ambiguity of the law: there are no legal provisions that clarify the public interest considerations. A second explanation is that China did not establish a separate review procedure for this public interest exemption. In practice, some approval decisions made by the enforcement authority led to confusion, as it was unclear whether the transactions were ‘exempted’ for public interest reasons or for industrial policies. This article reflects on the role of the public interest exemption in China. By drawing lessons from the past and examining the public interest exemption regime in Germany, it aims to provide suggestions for future reforms, against the background of the promulgation of the Amendment to the AML in 2022.

This paper focuses on the regulation of football agents in Europe by providing a comparative law and economics analysis. The paper starts by laying out a theoretical framework where the question is posed as to what reasons could support the need to regulate the activities of football agents. After having established that both information asymmetries and negative externalities could be a serious problem that merit regulation of some kind, the paper asks which type of regulation might be advanced by distinguishing between licensing, certification and conduct regulation. The difference between public and private regulation is equally discussed from an economic perspective. On the back of this theoretical framework, the paper turns to the (private) regulations adopted by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), explaining the way in which these regulations have evolved and focusing on the most recent changes introduced by the FIFA Regulations on Working with intermediaries (RWI) of 2015, which have been the subject of serious criticism in the literature. We then move to a more detailed discussion of the regulation of the activities of football agents in four selected European countries (Belgium, England, France and Italy), explaining the nature of the regulation (private by a football association or public regulation), the requirements that the agents have to meet and the way in which the system is functioning in practice. As this comparative analysis shows, there exist substantial differences between these European countries as far as the key features of the regulation in question are concerned. The paper equally provides a critical comparison of the four European countries in the light of the theoretical framework and asks whether the differences identified would merit harmonization at the European level. As yet there has been little intervention from the EU in this domain, but there have been increasing calls for such intervention, more particularly from the European Parliament for a regulation of players’ agents. The paper is the first of its kind to provide a critical law and economics analysis in a comparative perspective of the regulation of football agents in Europe.

This article attempts to answer the question whether the distinction between public and private companies is still needed or whether it is outdated. The question will be answered from an EU perspective, while taking the Dutch legal system as a leading example. In the Netherlands, there was a huge time-gap between the introduction of the public company in 1811 and the introduction of the private company in 1971, 160 years later. This seems to justify the question whether we needed the private company at all. Public company, private company, minimum capital requirement, capital maintenance rules, bearer shares, registered shares

This contribution calls for a fundamental rethinking of the foundation of the duty of corporate citizenship. The benefits enjoyed by a legal person, in particular when used as a vehicle to run a listed corporation, come with obligations, not because of some ethical responsibility or a misunderstood noblesse oblige, but because promoting the societal interest is inherent to the purpose of the corporation. Whoever wishes to use the legal person as a vehicle for business activities, with all its associated advantages, thereby also submits to the partly public character of that legal status and thus to the pursuit of public goals. This provides a deeper foundation for corporate social responsibility than the notion of corporate interest, which is strongly related to the actual day-to-day actions of the company and not to the basis for its existence. It is also argued that this should lead to specific binding standards of what corporate citizenship entails. To the extent that such standards cannot be made at the European level, the role of national regulation, and thus of the State, must necessarily increase to protect citizens from the excesses of global capitalism.

his chapter analyses the European and Chinese legal regimes dealing with marine oil pollution compensation from a comparative and economic perspective. Historically, EU countries have always been playing an active role in promoting higher standards of compensation as they were often victims of major oil spills. The legal regime in EU countries in compensating marine oil pollution victims is mainly in line with the international conventions, which is based on strict liability with an upper limit on the amount of compensation, plus a compulsory financial guarantee, and a compensation fund. Whereas in China, the compensation regime is only implementing the first layer of the international (and thus EU) regime, which is strict liability, limitation of liability, compulsory insurance. As for the compensation fund, China did not join the international fund as the EU countries do, but it has adopted a domestic fund. The efficiencies and effectiveness of these two regimes are thus analysed in this chapter through the use of economic analysis of law.

Nowhere in Europe are disputants forced to settle their civil or commercial disputes by way of mediation or any other form of alternative dispute resolution. Settlement is also completely voluntary in light of the fundamental right of access to court of Art. 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. This does not, however, mean that potential disputants may not be requested to attempt to settle their case before going to court, for example, by way of mediation, especially if strict time limits are observed for such procedure. In some European jurisdictions, attempting mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution before court action is initiated is mandatory, at least in certain cases. The present contribution will focus on such preliminary mandatory mediation attempts in a selection of jurisdictions.

This book maps the newly-amended Belgian ‘Preventative Anti-Money Laundering Law’ and its application to the professional football sector in Belgium, examining the goals it is designed to achieve, its primary legal implications for the football sector, and its likely effects. In so doing, this exploratory study aims to provide a preliminary evaluation of the application of the anti-money laundering framework to the sector of professional football in Belgium.

With Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technologies, individuals use electronic ‘wallets’ to collect information (‘credentials’) from various parties about themselves and present this information to (possibly other) parties. The context in which the information is presented, or used, is often different from the context in which a credential with this information is created and issued. In this paper, we illustrate this with financial guardianship, which is created by a judge in an official court procedure and which gives the guardian rights and duties that can or need to be invoked vis-a-vis a party not being the court. In this illustration, we explore (i) the application of SSI in the context of financial guardianship, (ii) what is characteristic about the gap between the practical (legal) and technical perspective, and (iii) what needs to be done to overcome the challenges. We observe gaps between the legal and technical reality. We offer insights into how to advance the application of SSI in the context of financial guardianship, and possibly beyond, which may be taken up in future research.

There are many issues around rules and related concepts. By developing a theory about the existence of social reality, this article aims to address these issues by discussing: the relation between rules and norms, the difference between deontic normativity and the normativity of reason, the (im)possibility of prescriptive rules, two kinds of constitutive rules, and the function of rules as constraints on possible worlds.

Rules of civil procedure reflect the state’s attitude to balancing competing interests of the litigants and the wider public interest. While litigants have an interest in protecting their autonomy in the conduct of litigation, there is a greater public interest in ensuring that litigation is conducted in an efficient, cost-effective and time-saving manner. It is for this purpose that the adversarial system came to be modified with some elements of the inquisitorial system, giving rise to case management whereby the judge takes an active part in regulating the litigation process. An important aspect of case management is identifying issues or disputes that can more appropriately be settled by less formal methods of dispute resolution. Where alternative dispute resolution is not favoured, the judge retains case management powers throughout the litigation process. This article presents an overview of the “Model European Rules of Civil Procedure” of the European Law Institute and UNIDROIT that are intended to guide member states of the European Union. The article concludes that the Model European Rules of Civil Procedure represent the best practice in civil litigation, the adoption of which by member states of the European Union will to a great extent harmonise litigation procedure throughout the European Union, although the Model European Rules may not be readily embraced by all the states.

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But i do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis i call “(compliance),” which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in sect. 2. There i also show that (compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In sect. 3, i claim that an alternative and more refined formulation of (compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems.keywordscoercioncomplianceobedienceefficacypractical differencegeneral jurisprudence.

In recent years, the work of organizations in the area of digitization has intensified significantly. This trend is also evident in the field of recruitment where job application tracking systems (ATS) have been developed to allow job advertisements to be published online. However, recent studies have shown that recruiting in most organizations is not inclusive, being subject to human biases and prejudices. Most discrimination activities appear early but subtly in the hiring process, for instance, exclusive phrasing in job advertisement discourages qualified applicants from minority groups from applying. The existing works are limited to analyzing, categorizing and highlighting the occurrence of bias in the recruitment process. In this paper, we go beyond this and develop machine learning models for identifying and classifying biased and discriminatory language in job descriptions. We develop and evaluate a machine learning system for identifying five major categories of biased and discriminatory language in job advertisements, i.e., masculine-coded, feminine-coded, exclusive, LGBTQ-coded, demographic and racial language. We utilized the combination of linguistic features with recent state-of-the-art word embeddings representations as input features for various machine learning classifiers. Our results show that the machine learning classifiers were able to identify all the five categories of biased and discriminatory language with a decent accuracy. The Random Forest classifier with FastText word embeddings achieved the best performance with tenfolds cross-validation. Our system directly addresses the bias in the attraction phase of hiring by identifying and classifying biased and discriminatory language and thus encouraging recruiters to write more inclusive job advertisements.

Quantitative recidivism risk assessment can be used at the pretrial detention, trial, sentencing, and / or parole stage in the justice system. It has been criticized for what is measured, whether the predictions are more accurate than those made by humans, whether it creates or increases inequality and discrimination, and whether it compromises or violates other aspects of fairness. This criticism becomes even more topical with the arrival of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. This article identifies and applies the relevant rules of the proposed AI Act in relation to quantitative recidivism risk assessment. It does so by focusing on the proposed rules for the quality of the data and the models used, on biases, and on the human oversight. It is concluded that legislation may consider requiring providers of high-risk AI systems to demonstrate that their solution performs significantly better than risk assessments based on simple models, and better than human assessment. Furthermore, there is no single answer to evaluate the performance of quantitative recidivism risk assessment tools that are or may be deployed in practice. Finally, three approaches of human oversight are discussed to correct for the negative effects of quantitative risk assessment: the optional, benchmark, and feedback approach.

In the past four decades that China has devoted to its offshore oil exploration and production, a model of joint development between the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and foreign operators has been used. Drilling for oil offshore is a challenging task with multiple hazards, as oil spills both from daily operations and from offshore accidents, endangers the marine ecosystem of nearby waters. Unlike traditional damage (i.e., personal injury and property damage) via the environment, tort liabilities resulting from marine ecological damage require a separate regime where relevant rules are scattered in different legal instruments. Some unique features rooted in the Chinese offshore oil industry fundamentally shape the liability distribution and the approaches to ecological remediation. The Bohai Bay Oil Spill in 2011 demonstrated that China was in urgent need of dealing with this issue in practice. This study will describe the applicable legal remedies concerning this type of damage and analyse the existing compensation system. Based on a law and economics approach, some observations are made on the efficiency of the regime to evaluate if the applicable rules are in line with economic starting points when compensating marine ecological damage arising from offshore drilling.

Whether legal systems are necessarily coercive raises normative concerns. Coercion carries a presumption of illegitimacy and a special justificatory burden. If legal systems are necessarily coercive, coerciveness necessarily taints our legal institutions. Traditionally, legal systems have been regarded as contingently coercive. This view is mainly supported by the society of angels thought experiment. For the past few years, however, this traditional view has been under attack. Critics have challenged the reliability of the thought experiment and have urged us to centre the discussion on typical legal systems: legal systems made by humans to address human needs. Once we do so – they claim – we would inevitably reject the traditional view. This paper argues that the critics are wrong. After discussing key features of the society of angels thought experiment and responding to objections, it is argued that even typical legal systems are contingently coercive. Coerciveness is a feature that our legal systems can and should strive to get rid of.

In this paper we extend Heidi Hurd’s “correspondence thesis” to the termination of pregnancy debate and argue that the same reasons that determine the permissibility of abortion also determine the justifiability of acts involving conscientious objection against its performance. Essentially, when abortion is morally justified, acts that prevent or obstruct it are morally unjustified. Therefore, despite conscientious objection being legally permitted in some global south countries, we argue that such permission to conscientiously object would be morally wrong in cases of morally justifiable termination of pregnancy. After presenting and defending our “correspondence argument” we suggest that conscientious objection should be denied as a matter of public health policy in developing counties, even in cases where adequate referral services are possible. Towards the end, we extend our argument to midwives, nurses, and prospective students in the field. Given their essential position in resource‐poor contexts; they too have no claim to conscientious objection.

Most legal and political philosophers agree that typical legal systems are coercive. But there is no extant account of what typically makes typical legal systems coercive when they are coercive. This paper presents such an account and compares it with four alternative views. Towards the end I discuss the proposed account’s payoffs. Among other things, I show how it can help us explain what I call ‘comparative judgements’ about coercive legal systems (judgements such as ‘Legal system a is more coercive than legal system b’) and how it can help the development of social scientific inquiries into the coerciveness of our legal systems.

The precautionary principle is a guiding principle that allows decision makers to adopt precautionary measures even when scientific uncertainties about environmental and health impacts of new technologies or products remain. It is also a debated principle. Proponents of the precautionary principle argue that it provides a framework for improving the quality and reliability of decisions over technology, science, ecological and human health, and leads to improved regulation. Opponents argue that it is incoherent, lacking orientation and that it hinders innovation. The aim of this Chapter is to increase understanding of the perceived tension between the precautionary principle and innovation by examining how the precautionary principle is applied in EU law and by the EU courts. This Chapter is based on the findings of an EU-funded research project entitled REconciling sCience, Innovation and Precaution through the Engagement of Stakeholders (RECIPES).

The new Belgian ‘Preventative Anti-Money Laundering Law’ (‘PAML’), recently amended in transposition of the Fifth EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive (‘AMLD’), is momentous from a footballing point of view, insofar as the Belgian legislator decided to explicitly subject the professional football sector to the obligations contained therein in response to a fraud and money laundering scandal in Belgian football. The Belgian legislator has thereby gone beyond what the Fifth AMLD requires. Since its entry into force in July 2021, the amended PAML is to apply to ‘professional football clubs’, ‘players’ agents in the ‘football sector’, and even the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) itself, as ‘obligated entities’. The PAML therefore brings the professional football sector within the scope of the accompanying ‘preventative’ anti-money laundering (‘AML’) framework for the first time. This has significant implications for the above-mentioned actors in the industry, not least the RBFA, given that it is concerned both as a governing body and as one of the obligated entities under the expanded Belgian PAML. Thus, research on this topic is pressing. Given the significance of this decision, this research report seeks to map this legislative initiative, the goals it is designed to achieve and its possible effects, as is explained in the first part of the report. Specifically, this study addresses the central research questions of what the primary legal implications of this decision are, along with what the main effects of this decision can be expected to be. In so doing, this report aims to provide a preliminary evaluation of the decision of the Belgian legislator to include the Belgian professional football sector in the scope of the preventive anti-money laundering framework and to gauge the effectiveness of this decision as a tool for tackling money laundering and generating financial transparency. Ultimately, on the basis of this preliminary evaluation, the goal is to formulate recommendations and identify best practices as regards the setup and the functioning of the Belgian anti-money laundering legal framework with respect to the professional football sector. Accordingly, it is envisaged that this research will be of substantial value first and foremost to the RBFA, as it is intended to elucidate the legal ramifications of the PAML for the RBFA’s role and duties, as well as its consequences for the RBFA’s recently established clearing system. Secondly, the project is of interest to the Belgian professional football sector in its entirety. Thirdly, since the PAML is the first of its kind in the European context more broadly, and could therefore serve as a blueprint for similar initiatives in other European countries, this study is also of potentially great importance to national football associations, clubs and player agents across the European Union and possibly even to the EU itself, as both the European Commission and the European Parliament acknowledge the need to combat money laundering in the professional football sector. The second part of the report is dedicated to the wider context behind this initiative of the Belgian legislator, and particularly to the EU dimension of anti-money laundering legislation. This part looks not only at the EU’s critical role in the development of the anti-money laundering legal framework and the European legal instruments that have been adopted and proposed in this area, but also at the longstanding recognition of the money laundering risks in professional football within the EU. Indeed, while the EU itself has not (yet) included professional football within the scope of any of its existing AML directives, EU institutions have long been aware of the vulnerability of professional football to money laundering. It is against this background that a general overview of the AML framework as applied in Belgium is then provided in the third part of the report. This overview covers a number of key aspects of the Belgian PAML. First and foremost, the material and personal scope of the PAML is elucidated, focusing in particular on the definition of ‘money laundering’ in the PAML and the obligated entities to which it applies. Secondly, the legal consequences the PAML entails for obligated entities are presented, including the obligations it imposes on these entities on both the organizational level and the level of individual client relationships. Thirdly, this part outlines the role of the supervisory authorities in the legal framework, as well as the role of the Belgian Financial Intellgience Unit (FIU); the ‘Cellule de Traitement des Informations Financières – Cel voor Financiële Informatieverwerking’ (‘CTIF-CFI’). After having described the essential content and requirements of the PAML, the fourth part of this study examines the application of the PAML to the Belgian professional football sector from a doctrinal perspective. As part of this appraisal, the report looks at the motives and institutional context behind the decision to subject the Belgian professional football sector to the Belgian preventive anti-money laundering framework, before considering the specific actors in professional football who are subjected to the framework, and providing an in-depth analysis of how exactly the PAML applies (or can be expected to apply) to these actors. This analysis necessitates a clarification of the meaning of certain key concepts in the PAML as applied to professional football, such as the (likely) interpretation of the terms ‘client’ and ‘business relationship’ within the law, with a view to discussing its practical application particularly in respect of Belgian professional football clubs and the RBFA (bearing in mind that the law has not yet entered into force in respect of player agents). In addition, this part of the report addresses a series of additional questions raised by the application of PAML to professional football. These include the territorial scope of the PAML (i.e. the fact that this is limited to Belgium, and what the implications of this could be in the broader European context); different possible approaches to the client concept; the possibility of an exemption for certain categories of clients; the concern that the obligations imposed by the preventive money laundering framework may interfere with the football transfer windows in Belgium; and potential barriers to the exchange of information between FIUs. Lastly, the operation of a ‘learning period’ in practice is highlighted. Then, in the fifth part of the report, the current state of knowledge in the literature on anti-money laundering is reviewed, focusing on the question of the effectiveness of AML regulation. The field of law in question is characterized by a conspicuous knowledge gap, because while studies have been carried out on AML and its effects, these have been focused mostly on the banking and financial system, rather than on the specifics of the professional football business and its particular multitude of stakeholders (such as e.g. the role of the federations). As part of this literature review, questions of methodology are explored, along with the significant variables of compliance and enforcement and the issue of available data on AML, as a precursor to exploring the overall effectiveness of AML, particularly in the financial sector. This review then moves to investigate the academic debate on the effectiveness of AML regulation in other sectors, including the art sector as well as ultimately the football sector, with a view to extrapolating theoretical and methodological insights of relevance for the research topic of the present study, and particularly the application of the Belgian PAML to the professional football sector. Finally, on the basis of all of the above analyses, this exploratory study concludes with a provisional assessment of the application of the PAML to professional football and its effectiveness as a regulatory tool for tackling money laundering and enhancing financial transparency in the football sector. Here, the most important findings of the study are summarized. In turn, on the back of this assessment, a number of recommendations are formulated that can be of interest not only to the Belgian legislator but also to any jurisdiction contemplating the extension of its anti-money laundering framework to professional football, as well as for interested stakeholders from the field of professional football, not least national associations and UEFA. These recommendations relate to (i) the formulation of the envisaged aims of the application of AML legislation and the necessity to assess whether these aims can be (best) reached by the application of anti-money laundering legislation, (ii) the need to tailor the anti-money laundering framework to the specifics of professional football, preferably in consultation with the sector, (iii) the need for a regulatory level playing field in the EU and even beyond, (iv) ensuring the qualify of enforcement, (v) the benefits of an institutionalized ‘pilot project’ and (vi) the need for increased attention regarding data collection and research on the effectiveness of AML, in both professional football and other sectors.

This article discusses the compulsory liability insurance for AI-related harm proposed in the ongoing EU policy debate. We not only explain from the demand side why liability insurance would not be the only financial security needed to deal with the risks created by emerging technologies, but we also clarify from the supply side the obstacles concerning the application of liability insurance in the digital age. This article argues that, even if policymakers are determined to mandate liability insurance for AI-related risks, it must be established in a balanced and evidence-based manner. Compulsory financial security is only indicated when there is a risk that the activity may cause serious damage and could lead to insolvency.

In the course of under a year, the European Commission has launched some of the most important regulatory proposals to date on platform governance. The Commission's goals behind cross-sectoral regulation of this sort include the protection of markets and democracies alike. While all these acts propose sophisticated rules for setting up new enforcement institutions and procedures, one aspect remains highly unclear: how digital enforcement will actually take place in practice. Focusing on the Digital Services Act (DSA), this discussion paper critically addresses issues around social media data access for the purpose of digital enforcement and proposes the use of a legal compliance application programming interface (API) as a means to facilitate compliance with the DSA and complementary European and national regulation. To contextualize this discussion, the paper pursues two scenarios that exemplify the harms arising out of content monetization affecting a particularly vulnerable category of social media users: children. The two scenarios are used to further reflect upon essential issues surrounding data access and legal compliance with the DSA and further applicable legal standards in the field of labour and consumer law., Accepted for publication at ACM FAccT Conference 2022