Food and Drug Law Commons^™

European Court Of Justice Rules In Favour Of Greater Transparency In Accessing Efsa Data, Luis González Vaqué

Luis González Vaqué

This commentary looks at an interesting judgment by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on 16 July. The judgment relates to plant protection products, but as it seeks to achieve levels of transparency capable of overcoming the lack of trust towards the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) - often accused of being biased for using experts with vested interests because of their industry associations - it may also be relevant to the food sector, given that the EFSA deals with many authorization procedures, opinions, etc. related to food products.

Resumen de la conferencia pronunciada el 10.11.2015 en San Cugat del …

The Jurisprudence Of Nature: The Importance Of Defining What Is "Natural", Jill M. Fraley

Jill M. Fraley

Informal regulations defining nature, natural, and organic have proliferated across diverse fields of law from patents to agriculture, from taxation to gemstones. The unwritten jurisprudence of defining nature is primarily a story of the struggle to isolate mankind’s manipulations and interventions, creating a man-nature dichotomy that frustrates more than it explicates. This failure to define nature continues with the Supreme Court’s recent Myriad decision, which struggles to define the law of nature exception to patentability, highlighting the challenge of measuring levels of human intervention and manipulation. Our dichotomous definitions do not generate neat, binary answers, but rather complicated scales of …