Legal Emulation between Regulatory Competition and Comparative Law

Abstract

Legal emulation between regulatory competition and comparative lawLarouche, P. Document version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2012 Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA): Larouche, P. (2012). Legal emulation between regulatory competition and comparative law. (TILEC Discussion Paper; Vol. 2012-017). TILEC. General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractThis paper puts forward an alternative path, next to regulatory competition models and comparative law endeavours, called legal emulation.Regulatory competition suffers from its very restrictive assumptions, which make it a relatively rare occurrence in practice. It is also exogenously driven, ignoring legal change brought about from within the law, and it takes an impoverished view of law. As for comparative law, it has tended to remain mostly mono-disciplinary. It usually lacks a dynamic dimension.Legal emulation tries to combine the more dynamic perspective of regulatory competition, with the endogeneity of comparative law. It rests on a theoretical perspective whereby the law is conceived as the outcome of a series of choices -substantive or institutional, fundamental or transient -made between different options (legal science would then be the investigation of the set of those choices). The paper provides an outline of the legal emulation model. Legal emulation ties together and explains a number of existing phenomena in many legal orders, such as constitutional, EU or human rights review; impact assessment; peer review within networks of authories; or the open method of coordination. Finally, the paper outlines some consequences of adopting a legal emulation model.