How does law regulate the system of food production and consumption? This study distinguishes three roles for law: supporting private regulation by industry through the market, supporting civil society co-regulation with industry and government, and supporting direct government regulation. This study employs empirical methods to assesses the progress of civil society co-regulation in three Australian cases where the public interest is at stake: added sugar nutrition, hen laying animal welfare and dairy farmer security. The study finds that support for the market regulation of the major supermarket chains remains the dominant role for law. Civil society co-regulation is making progress; nonetheless, it would have more impact if it had the support of government and law. Government is reluctant to give legal standing to the co-regulatory process and to legislate baseline standards. Beyond Australia, this study shows how all three roles of law are essential ingredients of food regulatory governance.

The WTO intellectual property and services agreements (TRIPs and GATS) form the global legal framework in which governments now regulate trade in knowledge. This second edition analyses the provisions of the agreements and examines closely the thirteen years of implementation and revision. Gathering together the interpretations placed on the agreements by the WTO dispute settlement bodies, it reports on the initiatives taken by the members both to liberalise trade in knowledge and to shape international business regulation. Drawing on this, Christopher Arup assesses the future of the WTO as a global law-making institution. Three expanded case studies (legal services, genetic codes/essential medicines, and on-line media) illustrate the impact of the agreements and highlight the challenges faced by the WTO in reconciling free trade with social regulation.

Innovation is widely held to be a central concern of economic policy and a key element in the transformation of the economy. This book, first published in 1993, illustrates the connections between innovation, policy and law and shows the ways in which the law can work as a key instrument of innovation policy. A cross-disciplinary study, it considers the ways in which the law has accommodated innovation, and the ways in which a legal framework for facilitating and managing new technologies has developed. As well as canvassing broad theoretical issues, the book presents a number of case studies. These include: intellectual property: patents and living organisms: copyright and computer software: competition and trade: competition law and foreign investment review: and government sponsorship and entrepreneurship: direct grants and tax concessions: telecommunications licensing. Innovation, Policy and Law examines issues in public and industrial policy from the viewpoint of legal studies. The book will increase understanding of the ways in which legal processes can promote innovation and assist in capturing the benefits that innovation brings.

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To support carbon markets, regulators must engage in a continuous process of learning. This article explores offsets regulation in the compliance markets of Europe, the United States and China, alongside the Clean Development Mechanism, to identify what has been learnt since offsets were initiated. We argue that offsets regulation must learn to work with demands for commercial viability, environmental sustainability and political legitimacy. We find that the learning here recommends greater control of the shares, sectors, sources and standards of offsets than was initially chosen. The findings provide some cautious optimism about the scope for improvements to such market mechanisms.