Category Archives: Public law
Samuel Beswick, ‘Equality Under Ordinary Law’
ABSTRACT AV Dicey characterised the principle of equality as the heart of the rule of law: ‘With us every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes, is under the same responsibility for every act done without legal justification as any other citizen’. In Commonwealth jurisdictions such as Canada, […]
Philip Sales, ‘Constitutional Values in the Common Law of Obligations’
ABSTRACT ‘Constitutional values’ is a term which appears to relate to concepts of what is now called public law. By constitutional values, I mean the basic ideas and interests which structure relations between the individual and the state, and the obligations to which they give rise, which underlie the common law and to which it […]
Richard Wagner, ‘Private law and public law within a theory of society’
ABSTRACT This paper treats latent conflict and not open concord as the key feature of human society. Harold Berman (1983) presented a magisterial survey of the development of the western legal tradition between approximately 1100 and 1900, the central feature of which was the emergence of polycentric legal arrangements and processes where conflicts are resolved […]
David Froomkin, ‘Taking Stock of Property Essentialism’
ABSTRACT A recent line of Supreme Court cases on the Takings Clause, most strikingly Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, which held that a California law granting labor organizers a right to access agricultural property constituted a per se physical taking, has advanced an increasingly essentialist vision of property rights. Property essentialism – the view that […]
Britta Redwood, ‘Reframing Reparations: Sovereign Unjust Enrichment Claims as a Private Law Model for Reparatory Justice’
ABSTRACT Over the past ten years, states in the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) have called on European States to make reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery (TCS). CARICOM states have suggested that if former colonial powers were unwilling to adequately respond to their demands for reparations, they would seek them through judicial means before […]
Vlad Tarko, ‘The Structure of Government’
ABSTRACT The paper overviews the classical liberal framework for thinking about the proper scope of government functions and their proper allocation to different levels in a federal system. The similarities and differences to the standard economic approach based on market failures are explored. I cover three key questions: (1) Which goods should be produced by […]
Nadia Banteka, ‘Police Vigilantism’
ABSTRACT This Article uncovers a critical yet unexplored dimension of policing: the strategic oscillation of police officers between their roles as state actors and private individuals, and its significant implications for police accountability frameworks. As officers toggle between these two roles to their legal advantage, they exploit a deep systemic flaw in the structural design […]
Cristina Tilley, ‘Impaired, in Pairs’
ABSTRACT Rape, like many other one-on-one aggressions, can be treated as both a crime and a tort. But neither body of law responds effectively to these aggressions. Criminal rape prosecution is notoriously difficult, and civil rape suits are notoriously rare. Today, as private law theorists have begun to study tort’s potential to drive social justice […]
Cristina Tilley, ‘A New Private Law of Policing’
ABSTRACT American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but […]
Godden-Rasul and Murray, ‘Negligence and the Vulnerable Subject: Public Bodies and the Duty of Care’
ABSTRACT This paper explores the limits and radical potential of public authorities’ duties of care to hold the state to account for harms suffered by those who are most marginalised in society. It follows a wealth of feminist and critical scholarship critiquing the abstracted and individualised white, pecunious, male subject at the heart of tort […]