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Recent EU legislative and policy initiatives aim to offer flexible, innovation-friendly, and future-proof regulatory frameworks. Key examples are the EU Coordinated Plan on AI and the recently published EU AI Regulation Proposal which refer to the importance of experimenting with regulatory sandboxes so as to balance innovation in AI against its potential risks. Originally developed in the Fintech sector, regulatory sandboxes create a test bed for a selected number of innovative projects, by waiving otherwise applicable rules, guiding compliance, or customizing enforcement. Despite the burgeoning literature on regulatory sandboxes and the regulation of AI, the legal, methodological, and ethical challenges of these anticipatory or, at times, adaptive regulatory frameworks have remained understudied. This exploratory article delves into the some of the benefits and intricacies of allowing for experimental instruments in the context of the regulation of AI. This article's contribution is twofold: first, it contextualizes the adoption of regulatory sandboxes in the broader discussion on experimental approaches to regulation; second, it offers a reflection on the steps ahead for the design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes.

Abstract
In traditional sectors, the intervention of private parties in the regulatory system tends to be justified by their enhanced expertise, government cuts or efficiency gains. In the sharing economy (e.g., home-sharing services offered by Airbnb), quality control and regulatory tasks (e.g., inspections) are to, a great extent, informally delegated to online platforms and peer-to-peer communities that rate and review performance. These communities consist of users that do not have more than their personal experience and the guidance of online platforms to underpin their assessments. Existing literature has extensively criticized the reliability of these online reputational mechanisms, but it has overlooked other far-reaching effects of outsourcing regulatory tasks to private parties. This Article offers a more complete analysis of the regulatory value of online reputation. I argue that reputational mechanisms have the potential of creating democratic spaces where users can provide unique, regular, and first-hand insights that would otherwise be disregarded in a traditional regulatory system. Nevertheless, in their current form, these mechanisms still offer inadequate protection to the public values that typically underlie the regulation of certain services. This Article explains this problem by comparing the protection of public values in the sharing economy to that of traditional regulated sectors.
This Article contributes to the literature by reflecting on whether the sharing economy is inviting us to rethink the broader involvement of citizens in the protection of public values and the challenges thereof. It suggests a framework to improve online reputational mechanisms and a better dialogue between traditional regulation and online reputation.

Quasi-constitutional statutes—at the resemblance of constitutions—aim to entrench core social values. Quasi-constitutional statutes are able to root these values because they persist through time and are able to stand up well to societal, political and economic changes and judicial challenges. Nonetheless, the legal literature has not attended to the informal forces that explain the entrenchment of legislation. These forces, however, are behind their long-lasting nature and the democratic acceptance of statutes that eventually acquire a quasi-constitutional character. In this book chapter, I draw on interdisciplinary literature and the specific case of the Affordable Care Act and other US health care programs to describe how certain statutes become informally entrenched and resist legislative reform. The slow-going changes in the US health care sector and the current difficulty in repealing or amending the Affordable Care Act can help us understand the role of social, political, and bureaucratic elements in the entrenchment of quasi-constitutional statutes

Legislative entrenchment or the long-term persistence of legislation has been associated with ineffective and obsolete laws. This position has nonetheless underestimated the natural bias towards the status quo that characterizes our legal order and the difficulty to terminate existing policies and laws. In this Article, I argue that the long-term stability of legislation only becomes a problem when it impedes the passage of new—and, in many cases, more effective—legislation. This Article aims to make two central contributions. First, it scrutinizes the legal and non-legal forces behind this problem. Second, it explains how temporary legislative measures should be employed to correct for the negative effects of legislative entrenchment. This Article suggests two ways in which these instruments may facilitate legislative reform. First, temporary legislative instruments (e.g., sunset clauses) can be employed as consensus-gathering mechanisms regarding legislative changes that might face initial opposition. Second, they can be employed as evidence-based mechanisms which promote research on available legislative alternatives. I contend that temporary legislative instruments such as sunset clauses, pilot programs, and state policy experiments should be used to produce evidence of the effectiveness of new legislation and rationalize the lawmaking process. This evidence-based approach can contribute to the disentrenchment of ineffective legislation and operate as a counterweight against certain de facto entrenchment forces

Introduction / Sofia Ranchordás and Yaniv Roznai -- Interpretation and the Legal Fabrication of Time / Lior Barshack -- Time and the Law : The US Constitutional Experience / Steven G Calabresi -- Time and Change in Constitutional Amendment / Richard Albert -- Night Laws : How Nightfall Shapes Regulation / Guy I Seidman -- Law and Time in Two Dimensions : Legitimate Expectations in the Case Law of the Court of Justice of the European Union / Patricia Popelier -- Timing of Judicial Review of Constitutional Amendments : Towards a 'Time Sensitivity Test' Following the Moldovan Constitutional Court's Decision on the Modality of Electing the President / Zoltán Pozsár-Szentmiklósy and Yaniv Roznai -- The effect of Specialised Courts over Time / Yifat Aran and Moran Ofir -- Temporary Legislation as a Mechanism for Reaching Consensus : A Critical Analysis in the Absence of Ex Post Evaluation / Enrico Albanesi -- Sunset Clauses : A Contribution to Legislative Quality / Helen Xanthaki -- The Legisprudential and Political Functions of Temporary Legislation / Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov and Gaya Harari-Heit -- Speeding Up the Legislative Process : To What End and at What Cost? / Wim Voermans -- Legal Schizophrenia : Rethinking the Dichotomy in Distinguishing between Retroactive Criminal and Civil Legislation / Yaniv Roznai -- Disruptive Innovation and Sunset Clauses : The Case of Uber and other On-Demand Transportation Networks / Antonios Kouroutakis -- Law and Technology in the Dimension of Time / Lyria Bennett Moses and Monika Zalnieriute -- Back to the Future : Waves of Legal Scholarship on Artificial Intelligence / Catalina Goanta, Gijs van Dijck and Gerasimos Spanakis -- Future-Proofing Legislation for the Digital Age / Sofia Ranchordás and Mattis van 't Schip -- Concluding Remarks : Time, Law and Change : It Takes Three to Tango / Luc Verhey

This chapter examines the use of soft law instruments in the context of urban regulation and governance. Soft law provides local governments with tools to regulate crucial contemporary problems while fostering international collaboration and involving non-state actors in urban governance. These non-binding instruments offer new possibilities and expand cities' typically limited range of action at both national and international levels. This chapter focuses on the use of soft law in smart cities, that is, urban centres that harness digital technology at the service of goals such as quality of life improvement. Smart cities have embraced soft law since they rely on new technologies (e.g., IoT networks, facial recognition) that pose challenges unaddressed by traditional regulation. Thus, smart cities employ technical standards, memoranda of understanding, charters of ethics, and establish international networks in their attempts to regulate urban problems with both local and global character.

Cities are increasingly influenced by novel and cosmopolitan values advanced by transnational technology providers and digital platforms. These values which are often visible in the advancement of the sharing economy and smart cities, may differ from the traditional public values protected by national and local laws and policies. This article contrasts the public values created by digital platforms in cities with the democratic and social national values that the platform society is leaving behind. It innovates by showing how co-regulation can balance public values with platform values. In this article, we argue that despite the value-creation benefits produced by the digital platforms under analysis, public authorities should be aware of the risks of technocratic discourses and potential conflicts between platform and local values. In this context, we suggest a normative framework which enhances the need for a new kind of knowledge-service creation in the form of local public-interest technology. Moreover, our framework proposes a negotiated contractual system that seeks to balance platform values with public values in an attempt to address the digital enforcement problem driven by the functional sovereignty role of platforms.

Social media influencers have become increasingly important in the last years. Influencers, that is, individuals with a large number of followers on social media, filter information, advertise products and services, offer advice, and promote political opinions with a significant impact on a broad audience. Nevertheless, their actions have remained largely unregulated and overlooked in the literature. This paper offers an exploratory analysis of this phenomenon and delves into the regulatory challenges resulting from the activity of social media influencers. It fills an important gap in the academic literature by providing an interdisciplinary analysis of a phenomenon with growing societal relevance. Given their large audiences, influencers are very effective not only at creating online engagement for the companies that employ their services, but also at manipulating their followers' opinions and transactional behavior, as the latter do not always distinguish between genuine and sponsored marketing advice. Although advertising regulations include endorsements made on Instagram or Youtube by 'prosumers', influencers appear to disregard these regulatory limits and national regulators have experienced difficulties in safeguarding their enforcement. In this context, average social media users are at an ever-greater risk of falling prey to inconspicuous commercial interests. This paper also introduces an interdisciplinary project that brings together insights from media studies, law, communication science and empirical legal studies, dealing with themes such as social media, influencer marketing, free speech, gig work, platform governance, and consumer protection.

This article discusses the growing trend to employ private parties as informants, private detectives and providers of digital technology (e.g., automated risk assessments) to predict and investigate welfare fraud. In this article, we argue that this type of outsourcing is problematic for multiple reasons. First, private actors and governments often have an ill-defined contractual relationship which creates legal uncertainty and promotes the use of unconventional evidence-gathering instruments. This issue also raises concerns regarding the accountability of public bodies and the transparency and fairness of administrative procedure. Second, the private enforcement of anti-fraud regulations is susceptible of endangering the adequate pursuit of the public interest due to the misalignment of public and private interests. Third, the outsourcing of enforcement tasks to private technology companies and their opaque automated systems can be detrimental to the right to due process, the right to non-discrimination, and the privacy of welfare recipients. This article contributes to the literature with a novel critical account of how private actors are reshaping the welfare state.

Cities are increasingly influenced by novel and cosmopolitan values advanced by transnational technology providers and digital platforms. These values which are often visible in the advancement of the sharing economy and smart cities, may differ from the traditional public values protected by national and local laws and policies. This article contrasts the public values created by digital platforms in cities with the democratic and social national values that the platform society is leaving behind. It innovates by showing how co-regulation can balance public values with platform values. In this article, we argue that despite the value-creation benefits produced by the digital platforms under analysis, public authorities should be aware of the risks of technocratic discourses and potential conflicts between platform and local values. In this context, we suggest a normative framework which enhances the need for a new kind of knowledge-service creation in the form of local public-interest technology. Moreover, our framework proposes a negotiated contractual system that seeks to balance platform values with public values in an attempt to address the digital enforcement problem driven by the functional sovereignty role of platforms. (C) 2019 Sofia Ranchordas and Catalina Goanta. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.