PhD student: Mr L. Knuth

Promotor: Mrs Prof E.I.L. Vos

Duration: 1/5/2023 - 30/4/2029

Abstract:

The EU legal order has shown a particular interest in developing mechanisms that integrate complex, specialised, and extra-legal knowledge into EU regulatory procedures. This can be observed to a particular extent in EU risk regulation. Governing risks has become a leitmotif of the Unions internal market legislation, influencing a variety of legislative branches from food law, chemicals, and environmental law to financial market regulation. In all these areas, extra-legal expertise, especially techno-scientific and economic expertise, is of paramount importance. Their utilisation in decision-making and regulatory procedures has not only had a lasting influence on the Unions institutional system, not least in the form of agencification, but at the same time creates the necessity to deal with the limits of knowledge, with uncertainty, ambivalence, and ignorance. Is rationalization supposed to improve quality and legitimacy of regulation and decision-making comes with considerable challenges, not the least with efficiency of legality control. In particular, the Courts as decisively judicial forums seem hardly equipped to engage in a direct review of the epistemic substance underlying expertise-based decisions and it is questionable whether they should do so. The project, therefore, analyses the repercussions on legality review evoked by integration of regulatory expertise into EU law.