Private Power Public Law

Analysis of the power of multinational corporations in moulding international law on intellectual property rights.

No detailed description available for "Public Property and Private Power".

Transnational merchant law, which is mistakenly regarded in purely technical and apolitical terms, is a central mediator of domestic and global political/legal orders. By engaging with literature in international law, international relations and international political economy, the author develops the conceptual and theoretical foundations for analyzing the political significance of international economic law. In doing so, she illustrates the private nature of the interests that this evolving legal order has served over time. The book makes a sustained and comprehensive analysis of transnational merchant law and offers a radical critique of global capitalism.

"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--

The aim of this edited collection of essays is to examine the relationship between private law and power – both the public power of the state and the 'private' power of institutions and individuals. It describes and critically assesses the way that private law doctrines, institutions, processes and rules express, moderate, facilitate and control relationships of power. The various chapters of this work examine the dynamics of the relationship between private law and power from a number of different perspectives – historical, theoretical, doctrinal and comparative. They have been commissioned from leading experts in the field of private law, from several different Commonwealth Jurisdictions (Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand), each with expertise in the particular sphere of their contribution. They aim to illuminate the past and assist in resolving some contemporary, difficult legal issues relating to the shape, scope and content of private law and its difficult relationship with power.

In Public Law and Private Power, John W. Cioffi argues that the highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial interests, contributed to the profound crises of contemporary capitalism, and eroded its political foundations. Analyzing the origins of pro-shareholder and pro-financial market reforms in the United States and Germany during the past two decades, Cioffi unravels a double paradox: the expansion of law and the regulatory state at the core of the financially driven neoliberal economic model and the surprising role of Center Left parties in championing the interests of shareholders and the financial sector. Since the early 1990s, changes in law to alter the structure of the corporation and financial markets—two institutional pillars of modern capitalism—highlight the contentious regulatory politics that reshaped the legal architecture of national corporate governance regimes and thus the distribution of power and wealth among managers, investors, and labor. Center Left parties embraced reforms that strengthened shareholder rights as part of a strategy to cultivate the support of the financial sector, promote market-driven firm-level economic adjustment, and appeal to popular outrage over recurrent corporate financial scandals. The reforms played a role in fostering an increasingly unstable financially driven economic order; their implication in the global financial crisis in turn poses a threat to center-left parties and the legitimacy of contemporary finance capitalism.

How is the distribution of power between the different levels of the contemporary constitution to be policed? What is the emerging contribution of the courts in regard to EC law,the Human Rights Act 1998 and devolution? What roles should be played by the legislative and judicial bodies at each level? Who should have access to the courts in public law disputes, and on what grounds should the courts regulate the exercise of public power? Can a coherent distinction be maintained between public and private law? These essays by leading public law scholars explore the allocation and regulation of public power in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of the twenty first century it appears that the traditional Diceyan model of a unitary constitution has been superseded as power has come to be distributed - particularly in the post-1997 period - between institutions at European, national, devolved and local level. Furthermore, the courts have come to play a powerful role at all levels through judicial review, while forms of regulation and contracting, together with other informal techniques of governance, have emerged. The contemporary constitution can be characterised as involving a multi-layered distribution of power - a situation which raises many key questions about the role of public law. The essays in this important collection tackle such questions from a variety of perspectives, aiming between them to provide a dynamic picture of the role of public law in the contemporary, multi-layered constitution.

This text is a study of the public/private law divide in the common law tradition. Its starting point is that substantive duties of legality, fairness and rationality are imposed by the common law on bodies discharging public functions, but not always on bodies discharging 'private' functions.