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In an article that made waves when it was first published in 1996, judge Easterbrook scorned the idea that the technological reality of cyberspace justified talk about or a need for 'Cyber Law'. Just as there is no need for a 'Law of the Horse' merely because horses give rise to legal claims, he argued, conventional legal principles and reasoning are sufficiently accommodating to absorb new legal challenges that arise in the wake of cyberspace. We may likewise doubt the need for a 'Law of the Mammoth', even though technologies emerge that harbour the prospect of bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction, reversing climate change, and creating new life forms. Cyber Law is now firmly established, of course, and Easterbrook also appears to have lost the academic debate from the likes of Lawrence Lessig. That fact notwithstanding, the onus to show that the time has come for a Law of the Mammoth clearly is on those staking the claim.

In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of the Regulation concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). Measured by the economic importance of the European chemicals industry and the environmental and health risks associated with it, the Regulation probably represents the most important piece of EU environmental regulation to date. We argue that the precautionary approach embodied in REACH has triggered a radical departure from past regulatory efforts that failed effectively to engage with contemporary regulatory challenges of scale, uncertainty, complexity and innovation. In effect, REACH is shaping a promising EU regime of responsive co-regulation that is without precedent in the forty-year history of EU environmental law. We believe that the success of this regime will not only determine the effectiveness of EU chemicals regulation, but more generally will come to determine the way in which EU regulation is likely to respond to a host of new technologies that shape our technological modernity.