Legal systems across jurisdictions are increasingly confronted with innovation and sustainability challenges that strain the foundational assumptions upon which modern regulatory regimes have long relied.
Regulatory frameworks traditionally designed to govern relatively stable practices now encounter activities that evolve rapidly, are mediated by complex technological infrastructures, and routinely transcend national, sectoral, and institutional boundaries. At the same time, sustainability compels the law to engage with long-term, cumulative, and often diffuse effects that are not readily accommodated by regulatory instruments calibrated to short-term temporal horizons. Taken together, these dynamics call into question the adequacy of legal models predicated upon fixed rules, determinate temporal assumptions, and linear conceptions of causality. They also generate tensions that extend well beyond individual sectors and call for a fundamental rethinking of the role of law in Europe.
This volume aims to identify and analyse a set of core issues and challenges that reveal a broader pattern of legal and institutional transformation. By placing a range of diverse contributions in structured dialogue, it delineates a unifying thread that runs across multiple fields of law and governance contexts. The fil rouge lies in the recognition that innovation and sustainability are not merely objects of legal regulation, but constitutive forces driving a paradigmatic shift in how regulation is conceived, interpreted, and applied.
Rules for a New Era offers an exploration of the profound transformations shaping contemporary societies, in which innovation and sustainability operate as structuring forces reshaping legal and regulatory frameworks in public administration, public procurement, and finance, while also addressing questions of social sustainability and inclusion.