Mutual recognition is a cornerstone of European integration, enabling cooperation across diverse policy fields while allowing the Union to pursue unity without uniformity. Yet, the Posted Workers saga – widely framed as a tale of tension between social rights and economic freedoms – exposes some of its limits. This paper uses the Posted Workers saga as a case study of mutual recognition. Empirically, it draws on the legislative negotiations behind the 1996 and 2018 Directives and case law from Rush to Laval, to examine legislative intent. The analysis shows that the 1996 Directive was not primarily concerned with protecting workers but with regulating the cross-border provision of labour via the freedom to provide services, through a mutual recognition mechanism. The mechanism was asymmetrical by design: it privileged certain Member States’ labour rules over others to address social dumping. The Directive was intended to create a ceiling – rather than a floor – of standards under Article 3(1), subject to narrow exceptions. Conceptually, the paper argues that mutual recognition operates as a generative yet fragile mode of integration. It is generative, fostering coordination between Member States and enabling free movement. Yet it remains fragile where the interpretations of the ‘content’ of such rules diverge. In the Posted Workers context, such divergence is evident via the conflicting understandings of ‘minimum rates of pay’. The paper concludes that while mutual recognition can facilitate diversity, it cannot indefinitely substitute for substantive political engagement in defining the content and scope of shared rules.

Supported decision-making is rapidly gaining attention as an alternative to guardianship and other forms of surrogate decision-making for people with cognitive disabilities. This article provides an overview of the legal status of supported decision-making in the United States, with particular attention to how states are recognizing supported decision-making in different legal contexts. It then explores how the law of supported decision-making applies to clinical research. It explains that although federal research regulations and guidance do not explicitly address formal supported decision-making, individuals may use supported decision-making to make decisions about participating in clinical research and researchers may be required to allow such use under federal laws that protect against disability discrimination. It then concludes by considering legal barriers to greater use of supported decision-making and how these barriers might be overcome.

The question of fair profits has been asked ever since modern finance has emerged. During the Middle Ages, it relates to the question of usury and the critical distinction between business profit-sharing and exploitative financial gains. With modern economies and the advent of classical economic theories in the 19th century, usury was claimed to be a virtuous sin which eventually (and supposedly) profits both sinners and society. More recently, this position was reframed and reshaped through shareholder value and shareholder primacy, which uphold the allegiance of business and society to financial investors active on unfettered transnational financial markets. The North-Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–08 exposed this alleged ‘end of history for corporate law’, reopening an evergreen debate on finance and society. In this context, my contribution provides a theoretical analysis of the notion of business profits, addressing the overarching accounting instruments that the law – comprising public and private arrangements, legal rules and social norms – puts in place to define and control for those corporate profits. My analysis is organised in two parts. The first part addresses two ideal types of financial accounting design contrasting: (i) an accounting system that purports to assess shareholder wealth through a fair value accounting model; (ii) another accounting system that purports to determine satisfying corporate profits through a historical cost accounting model. The second part discusses implications for corporate fairness and sustainability according to this dualistic approach which contrasts maximising (shareholder) value and satisfying profit-sharing, the former being framed by an unsustainable multiplicative process, while the latter by a sustainable additive one. This theoretical analysis aims to shed (some) light on the functional definition of business profits and its implications for corporate management and redistributive justice. It further highlights limits and shortcomings of resource valuation and net profit determination as suitable instruments to address matters of corporate sustainability and social responsibility.

This article presents a novel type of co-regulation under EU law: codes of practice under the AI Act. The introductory section offers an overview on how the AI Act combines general statutory obligations with various non-legislative instruments. Following a brief presentation of the legal basis for codes of practice in the AI Act, the third section provides a detailed account of how the European AI Office put this sketchy statutory framework into practice for the first General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, which was approved on 1 August 2025. Drawing upon this experience, the conclusion highlights two practical and normative issues associated with codes of practice: tech-induced acceleration and a diffusion of responsibility.

This article explores possible connections between health crises, economic policy choices, and the rise of populist movements, drawing on evidence from the interwar period. It considers how differing policy responses to the Great Depression may have been associated with contrasting trajectories in both public health and political developments. In Germany, the adoption of austerity measures in the early 1930s appears to have coincided with worsening economic conditions, declining health indicators, and growing electoral support for far-right movements. By contrast, expansionary initiatives introduced under the New Deal in the U.S. were likely accompanied by strengthened social protections, improvements in health outcomes, and what some observers have interpreted as a mitigation of pressures toward political radicalisation. Taken together, these historical experiences offer insights into contemporary developments, where perceived inadequacies in responding to intertwined health and economic crises could potentially contribute to eroding institutional trust and increasing receptiveness to populist narratives.

Public input can provide state agencies with critical information as they adopt health-shaping rules. However, generating meaningful public input is challenging. State administrative procedure acts set out how state agencies must make rules and establish notice and comment processes to seek input into rulemaking. Notice and comment, though, is not conducive to meaningful public input. To enhance public input into state rules, government entities should not limit their engagement to notice and comment and should deploy, and maybe even amend, rulemaking processes to facilitate public input. Meanwhile, advocates and community members should prioritize state rulemaking, in all its phases, as part of their advocacy efforts.