The market, the regulator, and the government: Making a blockchain ecosystem in the Netherlands

This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.

Contingencies in the Rise of European and Latin American Private International Law, 1850 to 1950

There were eight Latin American and European calls for the formation of multilateral private international law from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These calls are the birth of the multilateral tradition of private international law. This chapter will examine the contingencies behind the successes and failures of these eight attempts for multilateral codification. Among those impactful contingencies making their mark on the private international legal histories of Europe and Latin America are voluntarism, political influence exerted by the convenor, the international relations between the convening, invited, or participatory nations, the drafting procedure and the level of private international legal harmonisation among national legal systems. Then there were more regionally specific contingencies such as a European cholera outbreak as opposed to colonial trauma and post-independence solidarity amongst Latin American nations. The central doctrinal debate in both the Latin American and European multilateral private international legal movements surrounded personal law, specifically, the clash between nationality and domicile. Doctrinal preferences, like multilateral movements, were littered with contingencies related to whether the nation in question was an immigrant or emigrant country, whether it had been the coloniser or the colonised in the recent historical past, and the impacts of the World Wars.

Allocation of Regulatory Responsibilities: Who Will Balance Individual Rights, the Public Interest and Biobank Research Under the GDPR?

In this chapter, an analysis is undertaken of the division of legislative power in the space created by the GDPR, regarding the balancing of individual rights, the public interest and biobank research. The legislative competences of the EU, international obligations within bioethics, and the regulatory space left for Member States are all examined. The conclusion of the chapter is that in spite of the aim of the GDPR to further legal harmonisation, it is more likely that unity will be brought about through administrative cooperation and soft law tools.

Reconstructing Social Dialogue

The European Social Dialogue, and its output, the European collective agreements, are intended to implement minimum standards of working conditions that bind all Member- States, in a logic of legal harmonisation of the European Union’s social objectives. However, despite some federal traits of the European Union (“EU”), since the beginning European social dialogue has faced numerous challenges, particularly when confronted with the need to balance economic interests, giving social policies a subsidiary role, and when facing the different agendas of each Member-State. This article proceeds with a historical analysis of the development of European Social Dialogue, its implementation stages, and past and current challenges, which can be divided in three phases: past experience, present experience and current challenges and, finally, an attempt to project what new social policies might hold for the future.

CISG AND REGIONAL SALES LAW: FRIENDS OR FOES?

Economic co-operation and integration brings with it a need to harmonise mechanisms for the regulation of international trade, not only at a public-law level between states but also at a private-law level between traders inter partes. It is often forgotten that differences in the substantive law applicable to a contract function as a non-tariff barrier to trade. Because international trade facilitates economic development, the focus in this article is on the harmonisation of sales laws. Traditionally, private law harmonisation has been conducted by international private or inter-state organisations that specialise in the harmonising of law at a global level. Today, private organisations and groups devoted to harmonising business laws, as well as regional economic integration organisations, are also pursuing legal harmonisation. Global, regional and domestic laws now all exist in the same area of the law, which can give rise to duplication of efforts and problems with the co-existence of global and regional sales law. This article will discuss these issues with reference to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and selected regional laws in considering whether regional harmonisation can act as a stepping stone towards increased harmonisation at a global level or whether it is to be viewed as a threat to global integration and harmonisation.