ABSTRACT

The global reach and effects of EU law,1 or simply put for now, the ‘spread’ of EU law, is increasingly the subject of legal scholarship, which considers a broad range of its manifestations to other legal orders or systems, organisations or third countries, as an empirical phenomenon. For example, the so-called ‘Brussels effect’ is the subject of recent scholarship, assessing the perceived ‘spillover’ effect of EU regulatory standards on US rules in the realm of inter alia genetically modified foods, data privacy standards and chemical safety rules.2 Equally, recent accounts consider the extent to which EU legal rules are actually transplanted in the US – for example, the transposition of EU environmental standards in California, Boston and Maine.3 Included in these theorisations is the view that the size and scale of the EU, as a market and as a polity, has generated what is understood here as ‘rule-transfer’. It has entailed that the EU has adopted rules and standards that other polities and markets have in turn adopted, compelled to do so or acting out of sheer necessity. This process of the ‘outwards’ adoption of EU rules elsewhere, particularly in the US, is conceptualised in various legal accounts. This concerns the actual practice-based transfer of rules, less so the process and the significance of the EU’s promotion of norms. Such accounts offer normative explanations that are often dominated by market-based rationalisations, such as economic power, less so convergence or convenience.4 However, as will be argued here, economic arguments may be insufficiently nuanced to similar practices of rule-making beyond economic areas. Legal and other scholarship examining the external adoption of EU rules

1 For clarity, EU law is referred to here as incorporating EU rule-making. 2 See Anu Bradford, ‘The Brussels Effect’ (2012), 107 Northwestern University, LR 1. 3 Joanne Scott, ‘From Brussels with Love: The Transatlantic Travels of European Law and the

Chemistry of Regulatory Attraction’ (2009), 57 AJCL 897. 4 Zaidi Laïdi, ‘European Preferences and Their Reception’, in Zaidi Laïdi (ed.), EU Foreign Policy

in a Globalized World. Normative Power and Social Preferences (Routledge, 2008), 1; R. Dan Kelemen, ‘Globalizing European Union Environmental Policy’ (2010), 17 JEPP 335; Gregory Shaffer and Daniel Bodansky, ‘Transnationalism, Unilateralism and International Law’ (2012), 1 TEL 31.