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17 March 2021 / Sarah Moore , Stuart Warmington
Issue: 7925 / Categories: Features , Regulatory , Brexit , Health & safety , EU
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Product liability: into the unknown

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Product liability post-Brexit: Sarah Moore & Stuart Warmington discuss what the post-Brexit ‘new world’ might look like for product regulation in the UK
  • What might the post-Brexit ‘new world’ look like for product regulation in the UK? Can the UK’s domestic regulator alone keep us safe? And what legal challenges will be created?

Irrespective of whether the words in this title trigger Frozen 2 flashbacks, or not, they pose a crucial question in the context of post-Brexit product liability.

On 31 December 2020, we moved out of the Brexit transition period, and into, well, the unknown, with respect to the network of institutions and agencies across the EU that have worked alongside our domestic regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA)—to protect patients and consumers from unsafe medical products.

The UK entered the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the EU, in 1973. A year prior, Sir Harold Evans at the Sunday Times had broken the story of the Thalidomide tragedy. Evans’s reporting exposed

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

Thackray Williams—Lucy Zhu

Thackray Williams—Lucy Zhu

Dual-qualified partner joins as head of commercial property department

Morgan Lewis—David A. McManus

Morgan Lewis—David A. McManus

Firm announces appointment of next chair

Burges Salmon—Rebecca Wilsker

Burges Salmon—Rebecca Wilsker

Director joins corporate team from the US

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Disputing parties are expected to take part in alternative dispute resolution (ADR), where this is suitable for their case. At what point, however, does refusing to participate cross the threshold of ‘unreasonable’ and attract adverse costs consequences?
When it comes to free legal advice, demand massively outweighs supply. 'Millions of people are excluded from access to justice as they don’t have anywhere to turn for free advice—or don’t know that they can ask for help,' Bhavini Bhatt, development director at the Access to Justice Foundation, writes in this week's NLJ
When an ex-couple is deciding who gets what in the divorce or civil partnership dissolution, when is it appropriate for a third party to intervene? David Burrows, NLJ columnist and solicitor advocate, considers this thorny issue in this week’s NLJ
NLJ's latest Charities Appeals Supplement has been published in this week’s issue
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