University of Bristol Law School Blog
A window into the legal research carried out at the Law School
Yin Harn Lee, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol Law School
‘So … we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in?’
‘Except the public, sir,’ said William, trying to keep up.
‘Which isn’t the same as people and humans.’
‘I think it’s more complicated than that, sir.’
— Terry Pratchett, The Truth (more…)
Albert Sanchez-Graells, Professor of Economic Law, University of Bristol Law School
This blog post is based on the paper that was jointly awarded the Best Paper Prize Award 2024 by the Society of Legal Scholars. The paper will be published in Legal Studies in due course.(*)
Public procurement is concerned with the award of contracts for the supply, for pecuniary interest, of goods, services or works to the public sector. At its heart, public procurement governs the expenditure of public funds and, ultimately, should ensure that such expenditure is in the public interest. One could be forgiven for simplifying the goal of procurement to ensuring that public money is well spent, which could be further elaborated (following Schooner 2002) to encompass promoting integrity and value for money in the award of public contracts, and acting transparently to facilitate accountability. Even at this level of simplification, however, there is scope for contestation of e.g. what value for money entails (with a long-running debate on price/quality trade-offs), or whether it can or must (solely) be promoted through market-based competition (see e.g. Sanchez-Graells 2015, addressing the objections raised by Arrowsmith 2012 and Kunzlik 2013). (more…)
Margherita Pieraccini, Professor of Law, University of Bristol Law School.
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Environmental Law, I argue that defining the public interest and deciding in the public interest is especially problematic in fields where decisions concern collective action problems, involve multiple actors, crosstemporal and spatial scales, and occur under conditions of knowledge uncertainty. This is because there are multiple, collective, private, diffuse publics that gather around the problem in question. One such field is environmental law, on which the paper focuses. (more…)
by Professors Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Elen Stokes
How might we legal scholars develop our capability to work with legal futures? Why ought we to try? These questions lay at the heart of a one-day capacity-building Workshop held at the University of Bristol in July 2024, led by Elen Stokes and Amanda Perry-Kessaris.
We use the term ‘legal futures’ to refer to relationships that reach between the here-and-now and the yet-to-come, and in which legal thinking and practice might play a role. (more…)