Private Law Theory

Abstract:
Suri Ratnapala has lately been known as the Professor of Public Law at the University of Queensland. Yet, to think of Professor Ratnapala as a public law scholar fails to capture fully his contribution to legal education and scholarship. The focus of this article is upon the boundary between public law and private law. It defends the notion that there is an idea of private law which is fairly stable and conceptually distinct from public law. The existence of a fairly stable conceptual distinction does not rule out all disputes about how particular areas of human activity ought to be regulated. Moreover, the argument herein is not an argument that the common law of contract, tort, property and so on should be immune from legislative reform. The argument is merely that it makes sense to speak of a realm of private law which represents a distinct form of social ordering as compared to public law and that the distinction has important implications for legal interpretation and reasoning. The argument draws upon some of the major themes of Professor Ratnapala’s jurisprudential writing, particularly his engagement with the thought of Friedrich Hayek.

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Jensen, Darryn, Keeping public law in its place. University of Queensland Law Journal, Volume 33, Issue 2 (Dec 2014).

First posted 2015-01-19 07:40:05