Description
Internal market law is a site of many boundaries. It delineates between the European and the non-European, between the marketable and the non-marketable, between acceptable and inacceptable risk, and between legal and scientific forms of knowledge. Yet, science does not halt at the foots of the Kirchberg. Instead, risk regulatory disputes before the EU Courts have become frequent sites of scientific controversy. Where legal disputes centre aspects of scientific correctness, the Courts are increasingly tasked to calibrate their review vis-à-vis complex and uncertain scientific subjects.Internal market law is not only continuously delineating the boundaries of “European objects” (Brice Laurent) but equally constructing risk as its delocalised “hyperobject” (Timothy Morton) structuring regulatory intervention across policy fields. As a historically embedded concept, risk is not an EU intervention. Its genealogy roots point to the legal technique of insurance, where underwriting functions as a dual technique of objectifying and objectivising risk. In contemporary EU risk regulation, scientific expertise assumes a comparable role, underwriting the reality of risks in an institutional setting operating through epistemic delegation. Yet, where regulators face ambiguous objects and ‘uncertain risks’ (Michelle Everson and Ellen Vos), conceptual boundaries between risk and uncertainty as well as science and politics become porous. Often, scientific knowledge fails the promise to serve as “neutral arbiter of truth” (Vern R Walker). Rather, regulatory science actors themselves resort to “boundary-work” (Thomas F Gieryn), producing the rhetorical boundaries vis-à-vis the non-scientific as can be seen in current discussions concerning New Genomic Techniques.
Where science enters the courtroom, it enters as evidence. And where Courts delineate the boundaries of their legality review through discretion and deference, they engage in their very own boundary-work. In diachronic perspective, this practice of judicial boundary work generates a boundary that is all but stable. Its once static, spatial configuration justified by recourse to an alleged natural separation between science and law has shifted. Following the seminal Pfizer ruling, that boundary is one increasingly drawn between procedural and substantive review. Yet, while the Courts formally limit review to procedural questions, the duty of care in particular enables far-reaching, intense engagement with scientific evidence, transforming boundary-work in to an increasingly scalar modulation of judicial engagement with scientific evidence. Against this backdrop, the presentation reflects on the meaning and implications of this intensification of judicial review. ´
| Period | 21 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | MCEL Forum |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Maastricht, NetherlandsShow on map |