Category Archives: Public law
Sadie Blanchard, ‘Contract or Prison’
ABSTRACT Critics of the criminal enforcement system have decried the expansion and privatization of electronic monitoring, criminal diversion, parole, and probation. But the astonishing perversion of contract involved in these new practices has gone unnoticed. Governments are turning to ‘offender-funded’ programs that empower firms to contract with people who are suspected of or have been […]
Barbara Billauer, ‘Tort Liability for Governmental Failure to Protect the Public Health’
ABSTRACT Over half the states have enacted laws diminishing or curtailing the rights of the executive branch (legislatures or governors) to enact laws to preserve, protect, or safeguard public health in the wake of the COVID-19 emergency. Governor DeSantis, of Florida, for example effectively banned mask mandates in schools during the high point of the […]
John Lovett and Björn Hoops, ‘Adverse Possession by the State: Toward Remedial Equivalency’
ABSTRACT When governments embark on public projects, sometimes mistakes happen. A government might mistakenly construct part of a road or some other publicly owned facility on land that is owned by a private person without condemning that land. When this kind of mistake happens and a landowner does not object for a long period of […]
JE du Plessis, ‘Private Law, Public Law, and the State: A South African Perspective’
INTRODUCTION The division between private law and public law has been a distinctive feature of civil-law systems for millennia, but it has only relatively recently been taken seriously in the common-law world. And it is also only of late that scholars are globally appreciating that conventional presentations of the relationship between private law and the […]
Daniel Schoeni, ‘Government Contracts Law as an Instrument of National Power: A Perspective from the Department of the Air Force’
ABSTRACT Just as the law is increasingly recognized as an important instrument of national power, this article argues that government contracts law should also be recognized as such an instrument. Broadly construed, acquisition law encompasses a host of subjects that bear on national security. This discussion is divided into inward- and outward-facing components. Its inward-facing […]
Rebecca Williams, ‘Accountable Algorithms: Adopting the Public Law Toolbox Outside the Realm of Public Law’
ABSTRACT It is well known that artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, has the potential for hugely beneficial impacts on all areas of life, but also carries with it dangers such as lack of transparency, over-rigidity of decision-making, negative feedback loops and unreasonable inferences. Such dangers also have the potential to be scaled across a whole […]
‘Dicey + 100’
In 2022, the anniversary of the death of Albert Venn Dicey, the University of Oxford held a commemorative conference at All Souls that in part reassessed his legacy and explored hitherto under-researched aspects of his life and oeuvre. Revised versions of the papers given have now been published by Intersentia, edited by the organisers … […]
‘Ordinary Law, Constitutional Torts, and Governmental Accountability’
Samuel Beswick, ‘Equality Under Ordinary Law’, 106 Supreme Court Law Review (forthcoming, 2024) available on SSRN (November 9, 2023). The Supreme Court oversees a system of government accountability that has attracted a range of familiar and persuasive criticisms. Rather than basing liability on generally applicable legal principles, the Court has applied doctrines of sovereign and […]
‘The American Law Institute Launches Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts’
PHILADELPHIA — The American Law Institute’s Council voted today to approve the launch of Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts. The project will be led by Reporters John C Jeffries, Jr of University of Virginia School of Law and Pamela S Karlan of Stanford Law School. The project will examine the law of 42 USC […]
Enyinna Nwauche, ‘Does South Africa’s Proposed State Ownership of Data Make Any Sense?’
ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the proposed state ownership of data by South Africa’s Draft National Cloud and Data Policy 2021 and argues that the quest for state ownership is evidence of South Africa’s policy preference for the state custodianship of critical natural resources. The paper suggests that a preferred reading of the proposed state ownership […]