Category Archives: Public law
Juliet Kostritsky, ‘The Law and Economics of Norms’
Abstract: This Article examines the increased importance of norms in the law and economics of exchange. By studying how private parties bring order despite the absence of a coercive state and the idea of a norm as the result of an exchange that originates in the brain to accommodate all competing costs, one can better [...]
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 [...]
Hanri Mostert, ‘Nuisance’
Abstract: Does a constitutional order, one supporting human rights, change the way nuisance law works? In Scotland and South Africa nuisance law historically developed in very similar ways, and in both jurisdictions, the introduction of justiciable human rights has an impact on the general understanding of legal rules and principles. This essay focuses on the [...]
Roman Hoyos, ‘Property and (not “vs.”) the State’
“Richard RW Brooks and Carol M Rose, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (Harvard University Press, 2013). One of my favorite cases is Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which held that racially restrictive covenants (restrictions barring a racial or ethnic group(s) from owning a home in a particular neighborhood) were unenforceable. In [...]
Lynn Wardle, ‘Reconciling Private Autonomy and Public Interests in Family Law’
Abstract: One of the dilemmas in which modern and post-modern liberal governments struggle is how to reconcile the struggle between the quest for and the commitment to foster and protect individual liberty, independence, and autonomy with the need to teach, foster, insure, and protect civic (social and community) duties and responsibilities. This struggle is no [...]
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 [...]
Property and Constitution – A new and impressive book by André van der Walt
“… In the past months, I have been a visiting scholar at the institute for property law at the Catholic University of Leuven, where I have had the time to investigate differences and similarities between constitutional property law and private-law property law. From the tradition (the Netherlands) I am from, this mainly concerns the effect [...]
Sarah Lynnda Swan, ‘Triangulating Rape’
Abstract: Civil actions for rape and sexual assault have recently been undergoing significant changes in both quantity and quality. Quantitatively, the number of these kinds of cases has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Qualitatively, the litigation has shifted from a woman versus man paradigm to a triangulated tort claim involving a female plaintiff, a male [...]
Harry Hutchison, ‘Lochner, Liberty of Contract and Paternalism: Revising the Revisionists?’
Abstract: Given the resilience of the opposition to the liberty of contract jurisprudence, a doctrine that is epitomized by Lochner, and given the insistent dedication of scholars and jurists to a largely mistaken understanding of economic substantive due process argumentation, it is an appropriate time to review David Mayer’s contribution to the literature surrounding Lochner. [...]
The Public Life of Private Law – Recordings from Seminar 2 Are Online
“Audio recordings from our second seminar, held at the University of Warwick on March 22 are now available online, courtesy of Backdoor Broadcasting. Andrew Williams – ‘Personal Injury Claims in the context of Systemic Human Rights Violations: the case of Britain in Iraq’. Catherine Gilfedder – ‘Private Law Litigation: Reprieve’s Practice’. Nikki Godden – ‘Tort [...]
Recent comments