European Union legislative quality after the Lisbon treaty: The challenges of smart regulation

The aim of this article is to evaluate the advances made in the regulatory framework for the quality of legislation produced by the European Union after the Lisbon Treaty and to prove that the problems identified previously continue to plague European Union citizens and businesses alike. In order to prove this hypothesis, I will briefly present the regulatory framework for legislative quality. I will identify the elements of the concept of quality at a universal level and then I will evaluate the extent to which the recent post-Lisbon Smart Regulation initiative promotes quality of legislation in the European Union. Although elements of my analysis have been presented in other fora, the article is original in its hypothesis, methodology, and use of already published material as empirical data leading to an original conclusion.