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Legal efforts to ensure the safety of consumer goods cannot rely exclusively on the rules of product liability but have to comprise preventive measures as well as means to react to non-anticipated risks. The Consumer Product Safety Act 1972 still represents the most advanced legislative model responding to such needs. The article describes the Act's legislative history and its original regulatory concept. It analyses the practical difficulties and the political opposition encountered by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in implementing the Act. Regardless of the substantial cut-backs in the Commission's budget and the « deregulation » especially of the provisions on mandatory safety standards, the American expérience with the injury information System and with the recall of dangerous products should be taken into account in the further development of product safety law in Europe.

The Greek System ofjudicial control of legislation, in operation for the last hundred years, contrasts with the Systems prevailing in the rest of continental Europe which are based on the model developed by Kelsen of a system of courts of specialised jurisdiction. The Greek System differs because of the diffuse (or decentralised), indirect, concrete, and declaratory caracter of the control of the constitutionality of legislation exercised by ail courts. These are characteristics of the American approach to the control of the constitutionality of legislation. The diffuse, concrete and subjective nature of the control explains the preeminence of the legal rather than the political aspect, which is significantly reduced. This control originally found its justification in itsfunction as a guarantee of individual freedom. Its present justification lies on the protection of civil rights and collective liberties which are threatened by the crisis in the welfare state.

No one can doubt that trade unions are instruments of democracy in so far as they are genuinely representative of the wishes of the workforce. Thus we may suggest that democracy within trade unions legitimâtes the trade unions in a democracy. We are interested primarily in the following question : whose responsability is it to ensure democracy in the internal structures of trade unions ? Is it up to trade unions organisations themselves ? Or is it up to the law to establish and supervise trade unions democracy ? When the legislature does decide to intervene to impose democracy on the internal life of trade unions there arises a conflict between trade unions democracy and trade unions autonomy. The present article examines the role of the law in defining and protecting trade union democracy in Greece. The current legislation has as its central purpose the organisation of trade unions elections, the protection of the right to membership, the guarantee of equality between members. Although such legislation guarantees the democratic process in the internal affairs of the trade unions, it tends to restrain their freedom in adopting internal structures adequate to their specific purposes.

Article 17 of the USSR Constitution of 1977, expressing a positive approach to individual labor activity remained dead letter during a long period. The new law on individual labor activity of november 1986 does not simply admit the organisation of individual labor activity, it also stimulates the citizens and the local organs to use and develop creativity « this enormous unexploited potential of the soviet population ». The article treats consecutively the aims of the new law, the types of authorised and forbidden activities, the measures of control and the sanctions for infringements on the new legal regulation.

Modern technologies development reopens the delicate problem of the confidential information with economic significance also called « Trade secrets » or « savoir-faire » legal status. In the absence of specific rules, in France just as in Quebec, trade secrets are at present protected by both general law of obligations : contract (in France judges refer themselves to the actual content of a contract, whereas in Quebec they use the Common Law notion of fiduciary obligation) and tort law (notably unfair trading actions and even actions against parasitic activites). It follows from the complexity and fragmentation of the actual protection System that one has also to consider the application of property law principles which are identical in both countries. It can be shown that the general evolution of this branch of law added to the typical characteristics of trade secrets, makes such an application possible. Furthermore the individual and social interests legitimity, as well as property law usefulness in that case, render it appropriate. To consider trade secrets as property rights is in accordance with reality and makes unnecessary — at least in contract and tort, but not in criminal law — a new legislation which, at such an early stage, would risk to be unappropriate to a field which has just started its development — that is subject to the Canadian federal System requirements —.