Forum shopping in regulatory sandboxes and the perils of experimental law-making

Abstract

The gradual emergence of regulatory sandboxes in various jurisdictions has already triggered considerable attention of legal academia. Thus, academicians have addressed various legal frameworks, providing for regulatory sandboxes in the field of financial and energy technologies, artificial intelligence, medical products etc. In all these fields, regulatory sandboxes do currently serve as a tool for facilitating these new technologies, which could hardly emerge successfully under the rules of conventional legal frameworks. Beside identifying the advantages of regulatory sandboxes, various risks were also identified with respect to the prospective introduction of regulatory sandboxes in various fields of governance. This article aims to address the feature of ‘forum shopping’, that the spontaneous emergence of regulatory sandboxes might imply. The authors argue, that while such forum shopping will represent an inevitable implication of legal pluralism, one may also expect various attempts for the “passportisation” of regulatory sandboxes. At the same time, the authors aim to address a more theoretical question, to which extent are classical tenets of legal jurisprudence applicable to the experimental legislation?

Keywords

• regulatory sandboxes
• emerging technologies
• experimental lawmaking
• forum shopping
• “multi-jurisdictional” regulatory sandboxes
• passportisation