The Law Commission of England and Wales is currently working to produce a New Sentencing Code that will seek to remedy problems with one of the most heavily used and unsatisfactory areas of statutory law. It responds to the problems of complexity and inaccessibility in the current sentencing legislation, and more fundamentally in the process by which sentencing legislation is created and implemented. The aim is to introduce the new Code as a consolidation Bill in 2018 with a view to it being in force from early 2019. This article provides an overview of the problems endemic to the current law and how the Commission envisages that the new Sentencing Code will provide not only a remedy, but a lasting one.
It is important to understand from the outset that the scope of the Commission’s work on sentencing is to reform procedure. The project and the resulting legislation will not alter the length or level of sentence imposed in any case. The penalties available to the court in relation to an offence are not within the scope of the project and will not change. The change will be in the process by which each sentence is arrived at.

The partner states in the East African Community (EAC) have modernized their commercial laws to claim their post-colonial identity and facilitate development. While law reform and the harmonization of laws are both methods of shaping laws, the national law reform programmes in the EAC mainly aim to ensure that the laws reflect the domestic socioeconomic circumstances, in contrast to the harmonization of national commercial laws, which focuses on the attainment of economic development. This article observes that the reformed and harmonized commercial laws in the EAC are mainly legal transplants of the principles of transnational commercial law that have been adapted to meet domestic needs and aspirations.

Brazil is currently discussing the introduction of a nation-wide Fixed Book Price (“FBP”) policy, thus providing context for a discussion of its welfare benefits. There is a rift between the reasons for implementing FBP regimes, and those used to scrutinize them. In order for the debate surrounding the pros and cons of implementing FBP regimes to become more productive, one must investigate the links between the reasons for designing and enforcing such policies, on one side, and standard antitrust analysis, on the other. There are many interesting arguments at the table that both corroborate and compromise the case for an FPB policy. However, throughout history, these policies have experimented cognizable trends. The objective FBP regimes pursue and their design have changed subtly, yet relevantly throughout history. In our view, the current academic and public policy debate surrounding FBP regimes, in both countries considering adopting or revoking them, would benefit from an enhanced awareness of these trends and their policy implications. Ultimately, so would the antitrust analysis of these policies. We argue that a better grasp of these trends could potentially result in a more sober examination of the welfare risks associated with FBP policies.

The 2015 Better Regulation Communication advocates an evidence-based approach to regulation, which includes better consultations and broader civic engagement. In this article, I consider the recent EU public consultation on the regulatory environment of online platforms and the collaborative economy. I enquire in this context whether citizens were seriously regarded as evidence providers and how their knowledge that materialized in individual narratives could contribute to more legitimate and thus better regulation. I argue that an evidence-based approach to regulation should also include citizen narratives as they can provide first-hand and diverse perspectives, which might not be considered in standard consultation questions. I contend that citizen narratives can be particularly useful in complex and rapidly evolving fields where there is still little empirical evidence and where participants are likely to have diverse personal experiences. Drawing on the literature on narratives, I contend that this method of collecting information can help regulators identify new problems and structure solutions in rapidly changing and diverse regulatory fields such as the collaborative economy.

The European Commission’s 2015 Better Regulation package has placed ex post evaluation at the centre of European governance. This strengthens a trend of gradual politicization of evaluation in European policymaking. This article analyses how the European Commission’s approach to ex post policy evaluation has changed over the last decade. It shows how evaluation has developed from a rather technical process to a more politicized process, which is clearly linked to political priority setting, subject to centralized control, and involving a wider set of actors. At the same time, the Commission avoids a profound debate on the merits and objectives of the process of evaluation itself. The article concludes on the merits and risks of evaluation at times of rising populism.

The article maps the various ways in which review of Commission impact assessments takes place by the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the European Ombudsman, the European Court of Auditors, and the Court of Justice of the European Union, among others, and assesses the effect these review activities have on the framework and functioning of this primary Better Regulation tool.

Ex post impact assessment (traditionally considered part of policy evaluation) received less attention in the preceding ‘Better Regulation’ package (2011) than ex ante impact assessment. Yet, the insights generated through ex post impact assessment provide crucial input for streamlining legislation. In recognition of its contribution, the current agenda (2015) extends the reach to policy evaluation, and from financial instruments to regulatory instruments. In light of existing experience with impact assessments in Commission Directorates-General (DGs), the European Union (EU) institutions have been increasingly aware of the need to develop staff expertise in ex post (policy) evaluation, which has in the past been largely outsourced to external parties. Making sense of collected input and incorporating it within impact assessment is time consuming. Indeed, taking up the findings for practical use is a challenge for political decision makers but essential for the purposes of accountability, scrutiny and institutional learning. The challenge is more so, given the wealth of information being generated by multiple parties and the increasing technical and financial complexity of certain policy areas. The role of the Commission as an advocate of ‘Better Regulation’ has been studied extensively. However, we know relatively little about the role of the European Parliament (EP) in ex post evaluation. This article contributes to the literature on ‘Better Regulation in the EU’ by shedding light on the EP activities in the realm of scrutiny and evaluation. In particular, it looks at the Parliament’s use of special reports produced by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) through its performance audit work and how it takes on board the findings and recommendations in its scrutiny of budgetary spending. Moreover, it examines the emerging role of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) in monitoring the outputs of the ECA and other bodies engaged in audit and evaluation, and thereby, the way in which the EPRS is helping increase the Parliament’s capacity for scrutiny and oversight.

One of the commitments of the Better Regulation Package is to consider ‘both regulatory and well-designed non-regulatory means’. Such mechanisms include co-regulation, i.e. administrative processes which involve the participation of private parties, such as the social partners or the standardization bodies, as (co-)decision makers. While the involvement of private parties in European Union (EU) administrative governance has the clear advantage of delivering policies which are based on the expertise of the regulatees themselves, private-party rule-making raises significant concerns in terms of its legitimacy. This article aims to discuss the gaps of judicial protection which exist in co-regulation mechanisms, by taking the case study of the standardization process. After an introduction to the issue of co-regulation and the rationale for the involvement of private parties in EU administrative governance, the standardization process will be examined and the mechanisms of judicial supervision will be reviewed in order to establish the possible gaps of judicial protection.

The promotion of private regulation is frequently part of better regulation programmes. Also the Better Regulation programme of the European Union (EU) initiated in 2002 advocated forms of private regulation as important means to improve EU law-making activities. However, for various reasons the ambition to encourage private regulation as a genuine governance response to policy issues has remained a paper reality. This contribution asks whether and to what extent the 2015 EU Agenda on Better Regulation provides renewed guidance on how private regulation might be integrated in EU law-making processes. To that end, it builds on previous (empirical) research conducted on European private regulation and reviews the principal policy documents constituting the new EU agenda on better regulation. It is argued that while the new agenda addresses a number of the shortcomings of the old programme concerning the conceptualization and practice of private regulation in the EU, it still falls short of providing principled guidance on how private regulation can be combined and integrated in EU law-making.