Tag: pubintreg

Enforcement and the Greater Good: The View from Financial Services Law & Regulation

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By James Davey, Professor of Insurance & Commercial Law, University of Bristol Law School

Assume that we can agree what the greater good entails. And that we can design an optimal set of rules or principles that meets this objective. Who should enforce these rules, and how? This is an issue that caught the attention of leading scholars in the second half of the twentieth century. Papers by Becker, Stigler and Posner are emblematic of an initial burst of activity in the 1960s. This has since developed into a distinct branch of regulatory theory. Over time, this broadened beyond the architecture of public law and has become an embedded element within private law. This co-option of private law, and in particular the law of contract, as a form of governance has been decried by some but is now well established as a regulatory technique (Collins, 1999). (more…)

Copyright and the Public Interest

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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…)

The Procurement Act 2023’s Kaleidoscopic View of the Public Interest

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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…)

The public interest in environmental law: a pragmatist turn

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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…)

‘Computer says no’: Is automation in the public interest?

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By Kit Fotheringham, Bristol Doctoral College (University of Bristol)

Photo by Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash

In common with many developed nations, the public sector in the UK takes up a sizable proportion of economic activity. Therefore, the way the public sector is run is of interest to the public, both as citizens, who expect good administration of public services, and as taxpayers, who contribute to public finances. Of course, not all citizens are taxpayers (especially children and those on low incomes), nor can all taxpayers be regarded as citizens (notably, companies). Some scholars even question whether the balance sheet of a sovereign government with its own currency is comparable to the household pocketbook, positing that government spending contributes to overall money supply. Nevertheless, politicians play to the narrative that public money is the collective property of taxpayers, and seeking to persuade voters that their policies will offer the best protection against further encroachment on the economic interests of individuals. (more…)

Can Arendt’s conception of ‘public’ be used to analyse ‘the public interest’ in inquest decisions?

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by Dr Edward Kirton-Darling, University of Bristol Law School

Hannah Arendt by Attila Diénes (2016 bronze bust) inscription on the base in English and Hungarian ‘The flaming light of the Hungarian Revolution (…) is the only authentic light we have.’

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s discussion of a public realm and her distinction between the political and the social, this blog examines the ways in which conceptions of public interest can be used to analyse decisions in the inquest context. (more…)

Public International Law and the Public Good

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By Dr Lee McConnell, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol Law School

Notions of the ‘public good’ or ‘public interest’ are found in many areas of legal doctrine and discourse. At the international level, references to such ideals are perhaps most common in the context of human rights, but they are also present in many other subfields of international law. The UN Charter commits itself to the promotion of ‘social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom’, and to the ‘economic and social advancement of all peoples’. In the domain of State responsibility, erga omnes norms are said to be owed to ‘the international community as a whole’ (Barcelona Traction at [33]). The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea designates areas of the seabed and ocean floor as ‘the common heritage of mankind’ (Art 126 and preamble). The Outer Space Treaty provides that space exploration ‘shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries’ (Art 1). The GATT/WTO agreements recognise that trade relations should be ‘conducted with a view to raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income’ worldwide (Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, preamble). As this brief survey demonstrates, international law is a field that ‘tells a story of its own progressive development, and of its prominent role in the betterment of others’ (Sinclair, 2017: 2) It is a field which portrays itself as playing a substantial role in responding to global concerns, and as possessing ‘an immanent progressive value for the world, for civilization, for humanity’ (Skouretis, 2011: 6). (more…)

The unbearable lightness of being in the public interest

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by John Coggon, Professor of Law, University of Bristol Law School

The public interest has no single, fixed definition. Even as a technical term of art its sense varies both for being context dependent and for being a question that may be settled by different sorts of institutional actor. It may, for instance, demand consideration of national security, national economic interest, protection of health, maintenance of a justice system, protection of fundamental rights. And determinations may be made by courts, politicians, legislators, executive agencies, and so on. Each can and will bring different forms and ranges of consideration to the process of determining what the public interest demands, and whether those demands are compelling. (more…)

The Public Interest, Law, and Regulation: Clear, Consistent, and Coherent Relationships?

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by John Coggon, Edward Kirton-Darling, Margherita Pieraccini, Albert Sanchez-Graells, University of Bristol Law School

Rick Payne and team / Better Images of AI / Ai is… Banner / CC-BY 4.0

Widely in legal education, research, and practice, and across different areas of legal jurisdiction, law is a discipline that is characterised by its sharp division into sub-disciplines. With this division comes super-specialisation. That specialisation has the effect of inviting in-depth focus on discrete areas of law and regulation, without claims to expertise or application across the whole. At the same time, though, there are some basic legal concepts and phenomena that span the different ways that we might carve up the legal system. One, of course, is the concept of law itself. And there is a diversity of others, such as rights, duties, enforceability, and burdens of proof. A significant concept on that list is the public interest: a consequential aspect of law and regulation in practice and legal analysis. (more…)