By the time I finished doing regular practice, most of my work was in international regulatory law, so I was advising foreign governments about their responsibility and roles in things like public inquiries.
The world cries out for global rules that respect the achievements of science.
We have international standards regulating everything from t-shirts to toys to tomatoes. There are international regulations for furniture. That means there are common standards for the global trade in armchairs but not the global trade in arms.
The problem is that the global arms trade is entirely free of international regulation. In a world in which the flow of consumer goods is governed by a plethora of international conventions and regulations, deadly weapons have an uncanny knack of slipping through the net.
If the EU and the US can cooperate successfully on regulating financial markets, everyone else will follow.
I'm increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.
The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion.
The temperance movement must include all poisonous substances which create or excite unnatural appetite, and international prohibition is the goal.
There are governments who are regulating things in different ways and those forms of regulation often don't square up. So you have a real legislative mess, in the meanwhile various bad people are developing all sorts of tools to exploit the Internet for their own gain and the militaries are beginning to develop some extremely frightening offensive capabilities in cyber. Yet all of this is taking place outside of any international agreement or even framework.
Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about.
