"Editors’ preface" [2016] ELECD 1081; in Bignami, Francesca; Zaring, David (eds), "Comparative Law and Regulation" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) ix

Book Title: Comparative Law and Regulation

Editor(s): Bignami, Francesca; Zaring, David

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781782545606

Section Title: Editors’ preface

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Editors' preface


The domain of regulation has expanded dramatically over the past decades. In the
United States, regulation, defined as rules that govern private market and social activity
and that are made and enforced largely by specialized administrative agencies, has
always been a prominent mode of state action. By contrast, in Europe, Latin America,
and other parts of the globe, regulation has only recently become a pervasive and
distinct form of government activity with the retreat of both state ownership of industry
and the taxing and spending policies of the welfare state. At the same time, the
regulatory process has become global. Regulatory problems cross borders and therefore
so too does the governance of those problems. Transnational, regional, and international
bodies have proliferated. Deprived of the traditional police and revenue-raising powers
of the nation state, these bodies govern primarily through rules and standards that both
constrain and require regulatory action at the national level.
As regulation's domain has expanded, the processes by which it is made across the
world have come under scrutiny. The constitutional anomaly of a system of policy-
making in which the locus of power rests neither with elected politicians nor with
courts, but with public officials in specialized administrative agencies and transnational
networks, has given rise to a number of legal innovations designed to foster public
accountability. It has also prompted extensive scholarly inquiry into how to further
liberal democratic ideals in an age of regulatory governance. The instrumental ambition
of controlling private market ...