Travaux to the Treaties: Treasures or trivia?

Introduction: For most of the current era of European integration, the Court of Justice has not admitted preparatory work as evidence of the frames’ intent when interpreting Treaties. Even the teleology of ‘ever closer union’, as radical as its application has been, is firmly rooted in the text of the Treaties. Literature suggests this was linked to the secrecy surrounding early negotiations, and poor public access to the documents. Some at the Court have considered that these concerns are no longer relevant to the preparatory work to more recent Treaties. In several recent cases, the Court has reversed its initial opposition to relying on preparatory works to the Treaties. In these judgments, the travaux préparatoires have not offered merely superfluous additional arguments. We examine the extent to which the Court and the Advocates General have relied preparatory work to interpret the Treaties and determine the ‘intent’ of their framers. The references, whilst introducing a new source for legal interpretation, do not result in dynamic constitution-building. Rather, they reinforce static interpretations of existing provisions. Nevertheless, the possibility that this doctrine will develop into a more dynamic one calls for further research on their proper role in the interpretative process. If preparatory works should now routinely be accepted, on which precedents should the Court’s rules be modeled

Subsidiarity, judicial review and national parliaments after Lisbon : theory and practice

Subsidiarity: Theory and Practice before the CJEUPeer reviewe

Maankäyttö- ja rakennuslain maapolitiikan säännösten arviointitarve Euroopan unionin valtiontukisääntelyn näkökulmasta

Selvitys tarkastelee Euroopan unionin valtiontukisääntelyä sekä sääntelyn vaikutusta maankäyttö- ja rakennuslain kuntien maapolitiikan keinovalikoimaan. Kuntien maapolitiikan keinot voivat johtaa tilanteisiin, joissa julkinen taho antaa etua taloudelliseen toimintaan. Selvityksessä pyritään tunnistamaan näitä tilanteita ja arvioimaan, tulisiko maapoliittista järjestelmää tai sen osia ilmoittaa Euroopan komission arvioitavaksi. Selvitystarve liittyy ympäristöministeriössä vireillä olevaan maankäyttö- ja rakennuslain kokonaisuudistukseen. Julkisista varoista muodossa tai toisessa myönnetty tuki, joka vääristää tai uhkaa vääristää kilpailua suosimalla jotakin yritystä tai tuotannonalaa ei sovellu sisämarkkinoille on ilmoitettava komissiolle ennen toimenpiteen toteuttamista siltä osin kuin se vaikuttaa jäsenvaltioiden väliseen kauppaan, ellei tukeen sovelleta poikkeussääntelyä. Euroopan komissio ja tuomioistuimet ovat ottaneet kantaa kaavoituksen tuomaan arvonnousuun, infrastruktuurista ja käyttöoikeuksista muodostuviin etuihin, sekä erilaisista maksujärjestelmistä ja niiden poikkeuksista syntyviin etuihin. Valtiontukitarkastelu on laajentunut aiemmin julkisen vallan toteuttamiin palveluihin, kuten infrastruktuurin rakentamiseen tai yleisten taloudellisten palvelujen rahoittamiseen. Kuntien maapolitiikan keinoja on sovellettava tavalla, joka huomioi tukisääntelyn kehityksen

Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design,we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.Peer reviewe

Using Open Data to Rapidly Benchmark Biomolecular Simulations : Phospholipid Conformational Dynamics

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are widely used to monitor time-resolved motions of biomacromolecules, although it often remains unknown how closely the conformational dynamics correspond to those occurring in real life. Here, we used a large set of open-access MD trajectories of phosphatidylcholine (PC) lipid bilayers to benchmark the conformational dynamics in several contemporary MD models (force fields) against nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data available in the literature: effective correlation times and spin-lattice relaxation rates. We found none of the tested MD models to fully reproduce the conformational dynamics. That said, the dynamics in CHARMM36 and Slipids are more realistic than in the Amber Lipid14, OPLS-based MacRog, and GROMOS-based Berger force fields, whose sampling of the glycerol backbone conformations is too slow. The performance of CHARMM36 persists when cholesterol is added to the bilayer, and when the hydration level is reduced. However, for conformational dynamics of the PC headgroup, both with and without cholesterol, Slipids provides the most realistic description because CHARMM36 overestimates the relative weight of similar to 1 ns processes in the headgroup dynamics. We stress that not a single new simulation was run for the present work. This demonstrates the worth of open-access MD trajectory databanks for the indispensable step of any serious MD study: benchmarking the available force fields. We believe this proof of principle will inspire other novel applications of MD trajectory databanks and thus aid in developing biomolecular MD simulations into a true computational microscope-not only for lipid membranes but for all biomacromolecular systems.Peer reviewe

Emerging Era of Biomolecular Membrane Simulations: Automated Physically-Justified Force Field Development and Quality-Evaluated Databanks

Peer reviewe

Quantitative Comparison against Experiments Reveals Imperfections in Force Fields’ Descriptions of POPC-Cholesterol Interactions

Cholesterol is a central building block in biomembranes, where it induces orientational order, slows diffusion, renders the membrane stiffer, and drives domain formation. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have played a crucial role in resolving these effects at the molecular level; yet, it has recently become evident that different MD force fields predict quantitatively different behavior. Although easily neglected, identifying such limitations is increasingly important as the field rapidly progresses toward simulations of complex membranes mimicking the in vivo conditions: pertinent multicomponent simulations must capture accurately the interactions between their fundamental building blocks, such as phospholipids and cholesterol. Here, we define quantitative quality measures for simulations of binary lipid mixtures in membranes against the C–H bond order parameters and lateral diffusion coefficients from NMR spectroscopy as well as the form factors from X-ray scattering. Based on these measures, we perform a systematic evaluation of the ability of commonly used force fields to describe the structure and dynamics of binary mixtures of palmitoyloleoylphosphatidylcholine (POPC) and cholesterol. None of the tested force fields clearly outperforms the others across the tested properties and conditions. Still, the Slipids parameters provide the best overall performance in our tests, especially when dynamic properties are included in the evaluation. The quality evaluation metrics introduced in this work will, particularly, foster future force field development and refinement for multicomponent membranes using automated approaches.publishedVersio