Category Archives: Public law
Joseph Singer, ‘Living Property’
ABSTRACT The Supreme Court has increasingly defined property rights that are per se exempt from regulation in the absence of compensation, most recently in Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid (2021) and Tyler v Hennepin County (2023). The Court claims that it can identify property rights that are categorically protected from regulation by reference to history, […]
Eleanor Russell, ‘Liability of police authorities – Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police considered’
INTRODUCTION The law in relation to the potential liability of a public authority in negligence is a frequent visitor to the UK courts with a steady stream of key decisions having been handed down by our superior courts in recent years. The case of Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police [2024] UKSC 33 […]
Antonia Layard, ‘Public Land Law’
ABSTRACT While legislation and administrative frameworks shape how landowners own or use their land, land law continues to be understood primarily as a private law subject. Public interventions are conventionally treated as outside land law’s remit and are rarely addressed in property theorization. Responding to this absence, this article outlines the scope of public land […]
Francois du Bois, ‘Constitutional Transplantation Into Private Law: From Liberal To Republican Legal Ordering’
ABSTRACT Treating the horizontal application of constitutional rights that has developed globally in the aftermath of the Second World War as not merely having a ‘radiating effect’, influencing private law from the outside, but as transplanting constitutional thought into private law, this chapter shows that horizontality converts a liberal constitutional order into a civic republican […]
E Garrett West, ‘Constitutional Private Law’
ABSTRACT Constitutional private law is like ordinary private law. It imposes relational obligations on government officials, like duties to use only reasonable force against a person or not to fire an employee for discriminatory reasons, that are analogous to the rules of tort, property, or contract. Constitutional public law, by contrast, controls when and how […]
Sandy Steel, ‘Private Right and Public Right’
ABSTRACT This comment on Professor Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right focuses on two intersections between private right and public right: (1) permissions to use another’s property in circumstances of necessity, (2) distributive justice. My overall claim is that the boundaries Weinrib deftly articulates between private right and public right should not be […]
‘Contracts in The Digital Age’
Andrew Keane Woods, ‘The New Social Contracts’, 77 Vanderbilt Law Review 1831 (2024). A fascinating new article by Andrew Keane Woods examines contracts in the digital age. These contracts are society-wide in scope, and their scale surpasses other massive contracts we use. Moreover, they set the rules for digital society and govern the digital world. […]
Benjamin Weiss, ‘Civil-criminal hybridization: sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys’ efforts to blur the boundaries between civil and criminal law’
ABSTRACT Despite symbolic boundaries between civil and criminal law, sociolegal scholars note their conceptual and operational overlap, or hybridity. Values (eg, restoration vs punishment) and practices (eg, monetary compensation vs incarceration) thought distinct to each manifest in both, and contact with one legal system can generate involvement with the other. Scholars typically attribute hybridity’s emergence […]
‘The Return of Private Law’
Yotam Kaplan, Adi Libson, and Gideon Parchomovsky, ‘The Renaissance of Private Law’, 19 Northwestern University Law Review 1427 (2025). Recent events offer a grim picture of the future of public law. In particular, President Trump’s assault on the administrative state seems destined to hamper the ability of agencies to protect the public in familiar areas […]
Book Symposium: Haim Abraham, Tort Liability in Warfare: States’ Wrongs and Civilians’ Rights (2024)
A tort lawyer’s perspective on Tort Liability in Warfare: States’ Wrongs and Civilians’ Rights (Paula Giliker) An English foreign relations law perspective on Tort Liability in Warfare: States’ Wrongs and Civilians’ Rights (Uglješa Grušić) Breaking the silence – Redressing belligerent wrongs (Luke Moffett) Developing tort liability in warfare: a reply (Haim Abraham) ——!!!!!!!!!!!!—— King’s Law […]