My mission is to help
This fog, however, is the result of an ancient legal history. It propagated, virtually without restrictions, over centuries as the interaction of law and sciences was left to its own resources.
Since their advent in the course of scientific revolution, natural sciences posed a constant challenge for the law. A central example for this challenge, if not the very paradigm for it, became obvious in the legal term substance. While being the key term of the natural science chemistry, the law simply adopted this term without analysing its full significance. Subsequently, it spread into countless laws around the world. For more than 200 years, substances have been known as the object of patent rights. On the other hand, and mainly only since the 1960s, substances are also known as “legal entities” in terms of bans, restrictions or market admissions (e. g. for pharmaceuticals and narcotics, but also for industrial chemicals, plant protection agents and many consumer products).
As a consequence, more and more jurisdictions nowadays face a groundbreaking new area of law, the so called substances legislation. The law’s incorporation of the scientific term substance therefore marks natural sciences’ starting point as a trailblazer into diverse jurisdictions. Since then, this trail has been expanded much further and continues to expand …
The resulting challenges, however, mostly emerged without perception of any of the actors engaged. Neither the regulators, nor the regulated industries, nor legal sciences spent much effort on the specific needs deriving from the concurrence of sciences and law. As a consequence, the details of these challenges are still quite vague.
LAW FIRM MERENYI intends to approach this legal vagueness with new concepts and fresh ideas.