Regulatory Model for nanotechnology

Friday, September 8, 2006

I'd like to bring your attention to an SSRN paper written by Douglas Sylvester et.all about nanotechnology regulation. The paper explain types of regulation: "permissive" or "preventive", "early" or "late", "soft law" or "hard law", "national" vs "transnational", "bilateral, multilateral or unilateral" and "self-regulation". The paper also adressed possible content of Nanotechnology regulation and its regulatory approaches (short term vs long term).

This paper highlights more on the "legal form" and not the content of the legal norm. The arguments presented there would be very useful to adress nanomaterials and nanoscale technologies issue but may not be adequate to adress Molecular Nanotechnology (MNT) issues. I am of the opinion that long term MNT regulations cannot be grounded on an analysis which uses present-day regulations as its models.

You can download the paper here.