Conflicts of competence norms in EU law and the legal reasoning of the ECJ

This article is available open access from the publisher’s website at the link below.Defining competences in EU law has always been problematic, notwithstanding the inclusion since the Treaty of Maastrict of the principle of conferred powers as central to the constitutional character of the EU. Under the principle of conferral, the Union only has those powers actually conferred by the Treaties. However, the concepts of a common market or of 'ever‐closer Union' have a conceptual scope that potentially, in effect, negates the principle of conferral. This article argues that the framework of norm conflict offers conceptual insight into the dynamics of determining and limiting EU competence. In particular, it draws on the distinction between lex specialis and lex generalis to understand different ways of treating competence norms in legal reasoning. Following a discussion of the concept of competence norms, this conceptual framework is applied to two cases studies: (1) on the right to strike and (2) the general law of external relations

Solid Lipid Nanoparticles: A Potential Approach for Dermal Drug Delivery

Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) have attracted increasing attention during recent years. Due to their unique size dependent properties, lipid nanoparticles offer possibilities to develop new therapeutics. The ability to incorporate drugs into nanoparticles offers a new prototype in drug delivery thus realizing the dual goal of both controlled release and site-specific drug delivery. Drug delivery to the skin is widely used for local and systemic delivery and has potential to be improved by application of nanoparticulate formulations. If investigated appropriately, solid lipid nanoparticles may open new opportunities in therapy of complex diseases which is difficult to treat

The Youngest Lobe-Dominated Radio Sources

We present an analysis of multi-epoch global VLBI observations of the Compact Symmetric Objects: 2352+495 and 0710+439 at 5 GHz. Analysis of data spread over almost two decades shows strong evidence for an increase in separation of the outer components of both sources at a rate of ~0.2 h^{-1} c (for q_{0}=0.5 and H_{0}=100 h kms^{-1} Mpc^{-1}). Dividing the overall sizes of the sources by their separation rates implies that these Compact Symmetric Objects have a kinematic age < 10^{4} years. These results (and those for other CSOs) strongly argue that CSOs are indeed very young sources and that they are probably evolve into the much larger classical doubles.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, the preprint from the 4th EVN/JIVE Symposium, submited and accepted by the refereed journal New Astromomy Reviews. It is also available at: http://www.nfra.nl/jive/evn/symp/preprints.htm