The public interest in environmental law: a pragmatist turn

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…)

Resh(AI)ping good administration: beyond systemic risks vs individual rights?

By Professor Albert Sanchez-Graells, Co-Director of the Centre for Global Law and Innovation (University of Bristol Law School).

The Digital Constitutionalist (DigiCon) has recently hosted a symposium on ‘Safeguarding the Right to Good Administration in the Age of AI’, co-edited by Dr Simona Demková (Leiden), Dr Melanie Fink (Leiden) and Dr Giulia Gentile (Essex). Professor Sanchez-Graells contributed his thoughts on the need to extend good administration requirements to the phases of decision-making that are not yet directly relevant to the individual, as well as the need to broaden good administration guarantees to a collective dimension, to account for the new risks arising in the AI-driven administrative context. In this post, first published in the DigiCon symposium, Albert looks at ways to achieve this, whether through an expansive interpretation of Article 41 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union or through a European legislative reform. (more…)