Abstract

In recent decades technological innovation has been a driver for legal and regulatory innovation. In the EU framework, specifically, new forms of regulation have progressively emerged in accordance with the new governance paradigm. As a consequence, on the one hand we assisted to a combination of public and private spheres of action and, on the other, to a tendency to move from classical and hierarchical rule-making, towards soft law instruments or hard law instruments that fall outside the legislative sphere, thus creating a hybrid legal scenario. The EU food sector, which has always been characterized by several important regulatory interventions aimed at shaping new principles, procedural models, institutional arrangements and forms of responsibility, can be taken as a paradigm of such innovative dynamics of regulation, especially as regards nanotechnology applications in food processing and packaging.