Deregulation and Proactive Law As Regulative Innovations: A Case Study from Finland

Abstract

Regulation can be seen generally referring to policies where the government acts as a referee to oversee market activity and the behavior of private actors in the economy. In recent years, the regulatory landscape has changed and many industry sectors have been the subject of regulatory reform. In this chapter, we analyze and discuss the government proposals and bills recently given to Finnish Parliament, where such expressions as “enabling” and “freedom to choose” are frequently repeated. This kind of rhetoric is generally associated with more descriptive and elastic regulation. The research method in this chapter is a strategic review of scholarship on proactive law. We first provide a conceptual overview of proactive law, proactive approaches to law, legal innovation and disruptive innovation. We then give examples of how proactive law can be applied to regulation, both public and private, in order to create innovative regulation strategies. In conclusion, we discuss the outcomes that proactive law approaches yield for legislative reforms and their applications, and finally, we consider how future research should expand the theory of proactive law to encapsulate proactive law into regulative practices.