Category Archives: Public law
‘Religion, Self-Government & Private Law’ – audio now available
“Private law is associated with the possibility of individual and group self regulation. It allows citizens to depart from and supplement public norms. Our focus in this seminar will be on the developing religious use of private law to depart from the norms of state family law. Should we be troubled by ‘privatized diversity’ and […]
Alon Harel, ‘Public and Private Law’
Abstract: This is a survey of the debates concerning public and private law. It provides a link between two debates which are typically conducted separately from each other: the debates concerning the autonomy of private law and the use of private law to promote public ends on the one hand and the debate concerning privatization […]
Constance Anastopoulo and Daniel Crooks, ‘Where’s the Outrage? “Outrageous” Conduct in Analyzing the Tort of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress in the Wake of Snyder v. Phelps‘
Introduction: “… This Article analyzes the highly publicized case of Snyder v. Phelps to illustrate the current status of the tort of Outrage and asks whether courts should continue to recognize this tort or whether, in the name of refinement, the courts have eviscerated the protections and necessity of the tort. It is important to […]
Laurent Sacharoff, ‘Constitutional Trespass’
Abstract: The Supreme Court has recently created a trespass test for Fourth Amendment searches without explaining what type of trespass it envisions — one based on the common law of 1791, on the trespass law of the state where the search occurred, or on more general trespass principles. Indeed its most recent case raises the […]
Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy: Godden’s ‘Tort Law, Human Rights and Rape: Beyond the Enforcement of Criminal Justice’
“This post is by Linda Roland Danil, who is one of our PhD associates. The post responds to Nikki Godden’s paper from our second workshop, which you can listen to here. ‘One of the things that The Public Life of Private Law seminar series has provoked is a reflection of the varied feminist critiques of […]
Khoury, Couture-Ménard and Redko, ‘The Role of Private Law in the Control of Risks Associated with Tobacco Smoking: The Canadian Experience’
Abstract: Can private law litigation serve as a tool for advancing public health objectives? With this contentious and oft-asked question in mind, this text tackles Canada’s recent tobacco litigation. This Article first presents critical commentary regarding various lawsuits waged against Canadian cigarette manufacturers by citizens acting as individuals or as parties to class action lawsuits. […]
Andrew Burrows, ‘Damages and Rights’
Abstract: This essay looks at three topical aspects of the relationship between damages and rights. The first is the substitutive damages thesis which, it is argued, should be rejected. The second are damages under the Human Rights Act 1998. Here the argument is that the Greenfield case should be departed from: the scale of non-pecuniary […]
Reflections on Seminar 2: Private Law and the Subject of Human Rights
“The second seminar in our series was held at Warwick University on March 22nd. The seminar focused on strategic deployments of private law and civil litigation in vindicating human rights. Seminar discussions addressed and developed a number of important questions drawn, in particular, from our engagement with examples from current practice in human rights law. The core difficulty […]
Oman and Solomon, ‘The Supreme Court’s Theory of Private Law’
Abstract: In this Article, we revisit the clash between private law and the First Amendment in the Supreme Court’s recent case, Snyder v. Phelps, using a private-law lens. We are scholars who write about private law as individual justice, a perspective that has been lost in recent years but is currently enjoying something of a […]
Symposium: The Boundaries of Public Law
Michel Rosenfeld, “Rethinking the boundaries between public law and private law for the twenty first century: An introduction” Int J Constitutional Law (2013) 11(1): 125-128 doi:10.1093/icon/mos053. “The distinction between public law and private law has been both ever present and unwieldy in civil law as well as in common law jurisdictions. Kelsen found the distinction […]