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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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

Insurance can, as has clearly been indicated in the literature, play an important role in dealing with catastrophe risks, not only as a compensation mechanism but also as a mechanism to influence the behaviour of the insured. It is the concept known as ‘insurance as governance’. However, we argue that there are limited possibilities for this role as far as the insurance of pandemics is concerned. The traditional technical tools, such as risk-based pricing, are difficult to apply. In addition, there may, ab initio, be serious problems in insuring pandemics within one of the main conditions of insurability (controlling moral hazard through an effective risk differentiation). One remedy that is traditionally applied, more particularly for natural catastrophes, is mandatory coverage. Furthermore, the capacity problem might potentially be solved through a multilayered approach in which, in addition to insurance and reinsurance, the government could also take up a role as reinsurer of last resort. That would also have the major advantage of stimulating market solution (and potentially providing incentives for the mitigation of damages), which clearly fails in a model where the government simply bails out operators. Finally, one important regulatory intervention is that insurers should be better informed than was apparently the case during the last pandemic about exactly which type of risks are covered and which are not.

Insurance transfers and spreads risk, including climate change risk. It can provide direct financial protection to those affected by climate change. It has received attention for its regulatory function in influencing policyholder behaviour. This is sometimes called ‘insurance as governance’, a form of private contractual regulation. This article examines the functions and limits of insurance in climate-related compensation and in governing complex climate-related risks by describing the variable performance of such insurance schemes in China. We show that insurance can perform a useful regulatory function in adaptation to climate change. However, we equally make clear that insurance can play this role only if an appropriate regulatory framework is provided. The case of China illustrates how the very lack of such a regulatory framework limits the role that insurers can play in climate change adaptation.

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.

This article provides an analysis of the Directive on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers of 25 November 2020. The Directive enables qualified entities to bring representative actions on behalf of the consumer. The article uses a Law and Economics approach to stress the advantages of collective actions as a tool to remedy rational apathy and free-rider behaviour. The article therefore in principle welcomes the fact that this Directive will lead to all Member States having some form of collective redress. However, it is rather difficult to fit this Directive into the economic criteria for centralization as there is no obvious danger of cross-border externalities or a race-to-the-bottom. The article is critical of the fact that the Directive only provides for a representative action and does not mention the alternative of a group action (sometimes referred to as a class action). This is especially problematic if there are very few qualified entities that could bring the representative action. Furthermore, the fact that Member States may choose an opt-in procedure instead of an opt-out procedure is critically evaluated. The most problematic aspect of the Directive is the funding of the representative action. Punitive damages and contingency fees are rejected, and the possibility of third-party funding is restricted. It is therefore to be feared that this Directive, notwithstanding the good intentions, may not lead to much application in practice, since the question of how the representative action is to be financed is not resolved in any satisfactory manner.

Since 1997, various provisions have been incorporated into Indonesia’s environmental law which relate to corporate criminal liability. Other laws relating to natural resource management have also had provisions on corporate criminal liability inserted into them. These laws are problematic because they often fail to distinguish between corporate criminal liability and corporate officers’ criminal liability, and as do the courts in their interpretation and application of them. Currently in Indonesia, an officer may be held liable for a crime committed by their corporation, even without being at fault or appearing as a defendant in the trial. Indonesia’s environmental law can therefore be said to be applying a rather extreme version of individual vicarious liability in environmental cases, in which a corporate officer is punished merely because of their position as a high-ranking officer of a corporation. This practice seems to be the result of an erroneous interpretation of corporate criminal liability. We argue that the Indonesian interpretation of environmental corporate criminal liability is not only ineffective but also harmful and inconsistent with theories of corporate criminal liability. We also argue that corporate criminal liability should be distinguished from the liability of corporate officers. While corporate criminal liability places criminal liability on the corporation as a legal entity, officers' criminal liability places the criminal liability on the corporate officers as individuals. A corporate officer should only be criminally liable if they can be blamed for an environmental crime committed by the corporation.

The microinsurance market suffers from severe market failures; thus, government interventions are increasingly used to stimulate its functioning. Our article evaluates, from a law and economics perspective, whether these interventions are effective in increasing access to insurance without inducing moral hazard and adverse selection. We then use this framework to evaluate typical types of government interventions in the Chinese microinsurance market (subsidisation, simplification, use of group policy and established distribution channels). Using practical cases, we further identify solutions to remedy the market frictions induced by government interventions. We find that government interventions are only effective under certain conditions: (1) stable and smartly designed subsidies are provided or innovative market practices are subsidised; (2) insurance policies are easy to understand; (3) product distributors are properly trained or licensed; (4) group policies can be renewed.

Should pure economic loss be compensated in China? If so, to what extent? Both questions are left unsolved in the established literature. We contribute to the existing literature by showing that the Chinese courts have developed a relatively conservative attitude towards the compensation of pure economic loss and that the arguments adopted by the courts to deny recovery are neither fair nor reasonable. Using the law and economics analysis, we have recourse to four complementary solutions. First, pure economic loss cases involving socially relevant losses should be compensated. Second, when social losses are not involved, pure economic loss should also be compensated if the third parties are willing to pay or have paid for protection against such a loss. Third, to relieve the excessive pressure imposed by the compensation for such loss, the concepts of causation and the duty of the victim to mitigate damage need to be further clarified in Chinese laws. Fourth, when determining the amount of compensation for pure economic loss, we should carefully balance the trade-off among a variety of factors, including the extent to which the damage could have been foreseen, the nature of the loss, the blameworthiness of the tortfeasor, the size of the plaintiff class, the public policy toward professional standards, the victim’s private loss, the social loss, the courts’ capacities to calculate the loss, and the third parties’ willingness to pay for protection against the loss.

The adoption of 3D printing poses considerable liability risk to digital designers and fabricators. Traditionally, liability insurance is considered a crucial way for parties to shift their risk. However, in the context of 3D printing, uninsurability may serve as an obstacle for risk shifting. The main interest of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it sketches the extent to which risk can be unforeseeable (and thus uninsurable) in the context of 3D printing when legal uncertainties and the existence of adverse selection and moral hazard are considered. On the other hand, by reviewing various instruments, it offers potential solutions for reducing the uninsurability problem. Specific emphasis is given to applying InsurTechs, especially blockchain technology, to improve insurability and to identify the problems that will constrain the promotion of InsurTech in the context of 3D printing.

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.

Many of today’s products and services fall into the category of products and services that are, as such, legal but still unhealthy. Think of smoking as an example. This paper deals with the question of which mix of legal instruments should ideally be used in the light of such products and services. It distinguishes between products and services that predominantly lead to “harm to oneself” or “harm to others”. In the end, most law and economics arguments point in the direction of ex ante safety regulation. However, when there are concerns about the quality of regulation (eg due to lobbying efforts), liability has important added value. In the “harm to others” scenario, safety regulation is even more warranted because the larger number of victims and the increased difficulty to prove the causal link render litigation burdensome. Strict liability has several advantages over negligence and is, therefore, generally preferred. A strong point of negligence, however, is that it enables the court to conduct its own weighing of costs and benefits, which in specific circumstances may be better than that of the regulator or the producer. Furthermore, it enables the judge to consider not only the harm to the user, but also the harm to others in setting the due care standard.

This article discusses the extent to which private standardization contributes to environmental governance in China. It starts from the law and economics literature, which sees not only particular advantages in private standardization, more particularly lower administrative costs, technological innovation and flexibility, but also potential disadvantages, such as regulatory capture and under-enforcement. The article then discusses the use of environmental standards in China, with a particular focus on the role of private standards in environmental governance. The article points to the interdependence between private and public standards, as the government encourages private standardization, and public regulation equally incorporates private standards. Finally, the article analyses the benefits of private standardization as they appear in the specific case of China, but also the potential disadvantages and points towards possibilities of using private standards in a differentiated manner, enjoying the benefits and trying to remedy the potential disadvantages.

Although China remains the largest producer in the fishery industry worldwide, it faces substantial personal injuries and economic losses created by this sector. Considering insurance is a mechanism that potentially could deal with fishery-related losses, China set up private fishery insurance in the 1980s, but it largely failed in the 1990s. Over the past twenty-six years, China has developed an alternative financial mechanism, called fishery mutual insurance (FMI) to spread out risks, among which a large number of members are individual fishermen and owners of small-scale fishing vessels. Since 2008, there has been increasing financial support for FMI provided by the government. Guided by non-profitable FMI associations, FMI becomes a model of sharing risks among fishermen that create risks, which is substantially more like a risk-sharing agreement than a form of insurance. The paper analyzes the potential of this risk-sharing agreement in minimizing the total social costs of fishery-related activities in comparison to private insurance. Special interest is also given to identifying the problems that will constrain the promotion of FMI in the context of China.

Green buildings can play a role in helping countries meet their commitments under theParis Agreement on Climate Change. Green building can provide an important contributionto sustainability, for example, by improving energy efficiency, by improving indoorair quality, and by effective waste treatment. In practice, we see that there is an increasinginterest in various forms of green building. However, the existing literature has notidentified the role of law in promoting green building. It is, moreover, striking that greenbuilding has taken off in a rather impressive manner in China. Although generally there arestill huge environmental problems with which China is confronted, for many years alreadyChina has been engaged in green building. This paper wants to examine what explains therelative success of green building in China; What specific legal instruments can be used topromote green building; and what lessons can be drawn more generally from experiencein China? The paper uses the theory of smart regulation (Gunningham/Grabosky) and theeconomic analysis of law to examine the importance of different instruments in promotinggreen building. The paper comes to two key results, being that no single instrumentin itself is optimal to promote green building as a result of which a smart mix needs to bedesigned to promote green building; moreover, for the specific case of China, it is the largegovernment involvement in the economy that has been able to jump-start green building.The Chinese government has, on the one hand, mandated green building in governmentprojects, but on the other hand, also used market-based instruments (like subsidies andpublic procurement) to promote green building.

The investor-state arbitration system (“ISA”) was originally modelled on traditional commercial arbitration and was expected to deliver fast, good, and cheap decisions, especially in comparison to domestic court systems. Yet the ISA system has increasingly been criticized, especially by developing countries. Developing countries claim that the system is not cheap, that decision-making increasingly takes a long time, and that arbitrators are biased in favor of investors (often coming from developed countries in the global North) and against states from the developing South. Several developing states have even withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, which governs the settlement of disputes between investors and states through the institution of the same name. This article provides an economic and an empirical perspective on ISA: It reviews the traditional Law and Economics arguments in favor of and against international commercial arbitration, analyzing to what extent the characteristics of ISA make ISA different than international commercial arbitration. Moreover, the article summarizes the rich empirical literature on the functioning of ISA, and it compares and synthesizes this empirical literature with Law and Economics theories. Based on both Law and Economics and the empirical literature, the article then analyzes existing suggestions for reforming the ISA system.

Contains fulltext : 224795.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) In deze bijdrage betogen de auteurs dat het contractuele aansprakelijkheidsrecht slechts zeer beperkte mogelijkheden biedt voor een afnemer van producten en diensten die een cybersecuritycomponent bevatten om schade door digitale onveiligheid in een business to businessrelatie op de leverancier te verhalen. Een combinatie van juridische barrières (vage zorgplichten, exoneratieclausules, moeilijk kwantificeerbare schade, complicaties bij het vaststellen van causaliteit, en bewijsproblemen door informatieasymmetrie) en economische barrières (verschillen in onderhandelingsmacht, hoge kosten en risico’s bij procederen, en mogelijk faillissement van de schadeveroorzaker) zorgt er juist op het terrein van digitale onveiligheid voor dat een aansprakelijkheidszaak meestal niet loont. De auteurs doen aanbevelingen om het geschetste probleem aan te pakken. 7 p.

Just as in many other regions of the world, the European Union is prone to nearly all types of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. Moreover, due to climate change, both the number of incidents and the damage from natural disasters could increase. Natural disasters may cause significant economic losses, and consequently there is a strong demand for compensation for victims in their aftermath. We examine whether, from a theoretical perspective, there is any role to be played at the EU level in the compensation of victims of disasters, particularly in disaster insurance, and even if it were to be just a facilitative role, how this role could take shape in order to stimulate the insurability of natural disasters. We critically examine European initiatives with respect to disaster insurance and ex post compensation and formulate lessons learned on the basis of the theoretical analysis. We explicitly address the question whether the role of the EU should be limited to facilitating insurability or whether it should include providing ex post compensation to states as well.

This contribution focuses on the governance of industrial accidents and occupational diseases. Prevention of work-related accidents and diseases and compensation of employee-victims can be the subject of public regulation, such as OHS regulation and social security. However, also private actors may be involved in the regulation of work-related accidents, especially when compensation of damage caused by work-related risks is not (sufficiently) covered by public regulation. These private actors include representatives of employers and employees, but may also include private insurers. In some jurisdictions liability insurers provide supplementary cover for OHS risks and policy-makers often expect that the monitoring by liability insurers will increase safety at work. The main research question addressed in this paper is whether insurers (and more particularly insurers of employers’ liability) are indeed able to contribute to safety at work. Taking a law and economics perspective, we expect that this depends crucially on the possibilities insurers have to control moral hazard and adverse selection. However, the extent to which liability insurers have a financial interest in combatting these phenomena plays an important role. That may crucially depend upon the generosity of the public compensation scheme. First, we recapitulate the economic theory of insurance to the extent that it relates to work-related risks. Second, we address the question whether in some jurisdictions insurers have actually made use of these instruments, based on a literature survey. Third, we examine information on insurance policies offered by insurers in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to analyse to what extent theory matches practice.

We study a large-scale land titling reform implemented as a randomized control-trial to isolate its causal effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to rightholders. We find that, ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes do not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this litigation increase is likely to reflect 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 of these titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low value parcels which, under the customary system, it was individually optimal to keep unclarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the observed increase in litigation takes place among households characterized by low levels of wealth and market integration, who are likely to own land of lower value.

This paper uses the concept of ecological civilization (EC) that has been developed within China and is now promoted within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper critically examines the suitability of China&rsquo, s environmental law as an export product and uses the law and economics literature to formulate some critical observations with respect to the suitability of Chinese environmental law as an export product. Law and economics are also used to analyze the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) literature, arguing that the reduction of environmental pollution will only occur with an increase in regulatory and institutional structures. Then, the law and development literature is employed to critically analyze the so-called legal transplants phenomenon, whereby particular legal rules from a donor country are transplanted to a host country. That literature argues that transplants may lead to rejection if they are not demand-driven and do not take into account local needs. The paper therefore concludes with some implications for the idea of transplanting the concept of EC along the BRI.

The problem of the plastic pollution of the oceans is increasingly evident after 1997, when the great concentrations of plastics in the oceans was widely publicized. Still, there is a substantial lack of scientific data and research about the plastic pollution sources, destinations and consequences to nature and human life. The only certainty is that the amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean is alarming and does not tend to decrease any time soon, because of its durability and large range of use. Estimates show that, each year, at least 8 million tons of plastics leak into the ocean and, if no action is taken, this is expected to double by 2030 and to be multiplied by four by 2050. As a result, until 2050 there would be more plastic than fish in the ocean. This paper focuses on international legal pathways to face such a problem. It constitutes the basis for further research that aims at constructing a legal framework to adequately face the problem of the plastic pollution of the oceans. In order to do so, the first step is to unveil the already existing international instruments – both hard and soft law. It is indispensable to accomplish this intermediate step because a great part of such pollution is in international waters, where the only legal regulations and remedies applicable are those from Public International Law. Solely by knowing the state-of-the-art of this approach is it possible to critically analyze its possibilities and limitations, as well as to suggest how to proceed. Therefore, this paper aims at first analyzing whether the international instruments deal with the plastic soup issue, both from the ex ante and from the ex post perspectives. After showing that the current efforts are not compatible with the current harms and threats of the plastic pollution of the oceans, we raise suggestions on possible pathways and approaches to surpass the obstacles and to start facing the problem of the plastic pollution of the oceans.

There is an increasing attention both on how inspections and enforcement efforts with respect to regulatory breaches can be made as effective as possible. Regulatory breaches refer to violations of norms that have been prescribed in public regulation, such as, for example, environmental regulation, food safety regulation or regulation aiming at occupational health and safety. The enforcement of this regulation is qualified as regulatory enforcement. It has been claimed that inspections should not be random, but based on risk and target-specific violators and violations. Such a “smart” enforcement policy would be able to increase the effectiveness of enforcement policy. Policy makers are enthusiastic about this new strategy, but less is known about the theoretical foundations, nor about the empirical evidence. This article presents the theoretical foundations for smart enforcement as well as some empirics. Moreover, the conditions under which smart enforcement could work areidentified, but also a few potential limits are presented.

Mordernization has witnessed increasingly new industrial sectors which havethe potential to create environmental disasters. The insolvency of risk creators in case of such disasters may lead to insufficient compensation as well as to a dilution of preventive incentives. Insurance is a traditional instrument to address these problems, but is subject to limitations such as the lack of information by the insurers on the risk and limited insurance capacity. The risk-sharing agreement is an alternative which is widely used in high-risk sectors but it received relative little attention in academic literature. This paper analysesthe potential of risk-sharing agreements in minimizing total social costs of environmental harmful activities, in comparison with insurance. The comparison shows the advantage of risk-sharing agreements in terms of less demanding information requirements, allowing for mutual monitoring and the potential to reduce administrative costs. However, the analysis also shows that a few conditions need to be met for such advantages to be materialized.This paper then discusses a typology of various risk-sharing agreements and illustrates the different categories with examples from the maritime and nuclear sectors. Based on these experiences, this paper explores the possibilities to expand risk-sharing agreements to other policy areas where environmental risks may emerge.

We argue that climate law has specific features—including scientific complexity, a strongly transboundary nature, and long-term effects—that make it more challenging to study than other more traditional domains of environmental law. As a consequence, an interdisciplinary perspective may be needed even more for climate law than for the traditional study of environmental law. Climate law is to some extent underestimated by scientists, who should realize that for effective mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to climate change, an optimal design and enforcement through climate law is necessary. Climate law can be expected to become more important with the implementation of the Paris Agreement, and for that reason climate lawyers should receive a more prominent position in the international policy arena of climate change.

Societies worldwide are investing considerable resources into the safe development and use of nanomaterials. Although each of these protective efforts is crucial for governing the risks of nanomaterials, they are insufficient in isolation. What is missing is a more integrative governance approach that goes beyond legislation. Development of this approach must be evidence based and involve key stakeholders to ensure acceptance by end users. The challenge is to develop a framework that coordinates the variety of actors involved in nanotechnology and civil society to facilitate consideration of the complex issues that occur in this rapidly evolving research and development area. Here, we propose three sets of essential elements required to generate an effective risk governance framework for nanomaterials. (1) Advanced tools to facilitate risk-based decision making, including an assessment of the needs of users regarding risk assessment, mitigation, and transfer. (2) An integrated model of predicted human behavior and decision making concerning nanomaterial risks. (3) Legal and other (nano-specific and general) regulatory requirements to ensure compliance and to stimulate proactive approaches to safety. The implementation of such an approach should facilitate and motivate good practice for the various stakeholders to allow the safe and sustainable future development of nanotechnology.

There is a lively debate among scholars and policymakers on whether either consumers or producers should be seen as responsible for pollution caused in the production and consumption of traded goods. In this article, we argue that, in conformity with intuitive conceptions of causation, the economic incidence of a Pigouvian tax can be seen as a measure of the relative contribution to pollution of consumers and producers. Taking this perspective on the polluter-pays principle can help increase ambition in climate change action because it reduces the relevance of the question “Who is the polluter?” in climate change negotiations and enables a focus instead on the issue of “What can be done?” to reduce carbon emissions.