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This chapter considers the extent to which these various provisions provide adequate employment protection for free speech. Employees who exercise the right to free speech about work may well find their employers less than pleased. The employer may perceive the employee's action to be disloyal as well as disliking any adverse publicity that results from the speech. In response, the employer may take disciplinary action against the employee, and may even dismiss them. The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 extends the law on unfair dismissal to provide automatic protection for employees who raise matters of concern relating to designated types of wrongdoing or malpractice at work. In addition, several statutes, such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, provide protection for employees who disclose that their standards are not being met.

This essay revisits a classic work in the field of comparative public interest law, in relation to its conclusions on the potential of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) for countries in the global South. Published in 1987, The Role of the Judiciary in Plural Societies (ROJ) comprises a selection of academic papers presented at two workshops held in Surajkund, India and Eldoret, Kenya in August 1983 and February 1985 respectively. It addressed the role of judiciaries in aiding public interest law movements in five countries across Asia and Africa. It concluded that judicial activism, encouraged by social action litigation [or PIL], inspired by constitutional values, may be regarded as a vital human technology for social change in impoverished societies. After describing the Indian experience with Public Interest Litigations (PIL) in the last twenty five years, the author outlines the growing discontent among progressives over PIL, and the reasons for such a trend. The author concludes that the judiciary should reformulate its role in PIL by giving up the ‘command-and-control’ methods that have led to some of the gravest problems of contemporary PIL jurisprudence, including those where the judiciary has spurned the interests of the original constituency of PIL. The judiciary should focus on being an ally to strong civil society groups and movements in their attempt to make the processes of Indian democracy more participatory, inclusive, and effective in pursuing the developmental goals enshrined in the Constitution.

Public interest groups in Germany use policy analysis in two crucial ways: They dig out empirical evidence for policy instruments and they seek to frame those instruments preferred. The chapter highlights striking differences between environmental groups and consumer groups by asking: What challenges are linked to evidence-based policy making± How is policy analysis turned into a powerful tool in public debates and political communication± What core functions does policy analysis fulfil for public interest groups in Germany and what are its main shortcomings?

This chapter argues that we need new political and economic institutions which are participatory, inclusive and accessible and sets out some ideas about how this can be achieved. These can be the catalyst for the development of a popular democratic culture of public participation in economic discussion and decision making.

The emergence of conservative public-interest law provoked controversy within the American right, where many leading legal intellectuals worried that conservative legal activism threatened conservative legal principles by asking courts to resolve political disputes. Conservatives, including Kit Bond of Great Plains Legal Foundation and Daniel Popeo of Washington Legal Foundation, began to debate the virtues and vices of public-interest law, shifts in US legal culture, and methods of thinking about the “rights revolution” that was initially sparked by the African American struggle for equality but eventually spread more broadly. At Washington Legal Foundation, Popeo articulated a variety of conservative counter-rights on social, cultural, and foreign policy issues. At Capital Legal Foundation, lawyer Dan Burt argued that conservative legal groups needed to challenge the rules and culture that had allowed public-interest law to flourish in the first place.

This chapter explains that the statutory changes of the Progressive, New Deal, and Public Interest Eras came in response to perceived crises in the political economy as manifested in media reports of widespread corporate abuses. Guided by the insights of Progressive Era legal realists, state supreme courts abandoned many Laissez Faire Era legal doctrines that limited corporate liability. Cumulatively, the statutes imposed broad obligations on companies to pay far more attention to the impact of their products and activities on their consumers, workers, neighbors, and the environment than they had in the past. Although the changes mandated by the new statutes rarely demanded more than what was already technologically feasible, they greatly improved the lives of most Americans.

Chapter 4 deals with the issue of lack of access to justice and attempts to find reasons for the inaccessibility of the higher judiciary. While it appears to be clear to observers that the Supreme Court and high courts are not accessible enough, surprisingly, there are actually no empirical studies that examine why this is the case. Some factors can, however, be deduced from a study dealing with the inaccessibility of district courts, that is, the lower judiciary.The fourth chapter also shows that the institution of Public Interest Litigation, for various reasons, cannot compensate for lack of access to justice, and that the state is not properly implementing (or not at all exploring) many other possible alternative mechanisms.

This chapter focuses on the three assaults on regulation, highlighting the efforts in the executive branch to rein-in the regulatory agencies, and in Congress to pass omnibus regulatory reform legislation. The assaults proceeded along many dimensions as the business community's influence infrastructure pressed Congress to repeal or substantially rewrite protective statutes and, failing that, to enact legislation designed to slow down or hamstring the regulatory agencies as they promulgated the regulations needed to implement those statutes. At the same time, they pressed the White House to impose cumbersome procedural and analytical restrictions on executive branch agencies. Headed by political appointees who were unsympathetic to their statutory missions, the agencies abandoned the proactive approaches that they employed during the Public Interest Era and assumed a reactive posture.

Lachs argues that liberty is a relevant idea in addressing technological advances concerning organ transplant. Arguing that the poor have a right to make use of their bodies in securing wealth, he contends that the government has no right to interfere with the sale of skills and bodies, so long as this activity does not harm others.

Explores the phenomenon of compulsory liability insurance in general, and specifically the nature of compulsory insurance in relation to road traffic liabilities, and employers’ liability to employees. Explains that much of tort law operates on the basis that insurance is in place, whether required or simply widespread. Charts the forms of compulsory insurance in operation and explains the variables which affect their significance. Explores the operation of compulsory motor insurance, and identifies the influence of European law. Discusses the way in which responsibility has been transformed, and potential impacts on legal principle. Explores the history and nature of employers’ liability insurance, pointing out the long-standing legislative interest in securing liabilities through insurance, and the influence of employers’ liability on the early development of liability insurance business. Identifies the relatively weak protection offered by employers’ liability legislation, but sets this in the context of many years of legislative activity.

This chapter explores the literature on the market for corporate control and takeovers before offering some suggestions as to how takeover policy might be developed in the UK context. The chapter examines the dynamics of takeovers and mergers by charting six great historical takeover ‘waves’. It examines why takeover waves occur, and why they rise and fall. It then examines the market for corporate control in civil law and non-civil law countries before discussing the determinant of share prices, the market for corporate control, and nature of the takeover mechanism. It finishes by examining the recent debates on takeover policy stimulated by the Cadbury and AstraZeneca cases, before offering some suggestions as to how takeover policy might be developed through ‘throwing some sand’ in the wheels of the takeover machine and the adoption of a new ‘Public Interest Test’.

This chapter explains the institutional impact of the three assaults on the protective governmental infrastructure. The tendency of agencies to become captured by regulated interests and the related revolving door between agency and industry employment are longstanding problems that predate the Laissez Faire Revival. As companies found ways around existing regulatory restrictions during the Laissez Faire Revival, serious gaps in the protective governmental infrastructure became apparent. A conciliatory federal enforcement apparatus stressed accommodation over vigorous prosecution, and an emasculated civil justice system was far less inclined to hold companies accountable for the harmful consequences of their products and activities than it had been during the Public Interest Era. Private sector actors acquired greater freedom to pursue their economic goals without regard to the risks that their products and activities posed to their consumers, their workers, their neighbors, or the environment.

Low and declining levels of trust in politicians, prompted in part by perceptions that they are too often to be found engaged in corruption and other forms of wrong-doing has in recent years turned corruption itself into a high-profile political issue. Against this background, the chapter considers what political corruption is, or might be, for the study of anything requires having a clear understanding of its nature. Then it discusses the different types of corruption to be found, and finally it says something about why their study might be important. The chapter argues that, understood as the adulteration of public by private interests, corruption is a relatively modern notion; suggests that it is possible to distinguish between four types of corruption understood in principal-agent terms, and makes the case that corruption is, as an object of study, important for its incidence and its effects.

This chapter describes how a safe and efficient transportation system is essential to a healthy modern economy. The governmental infrastructure that Congress established during the Progressive, New Deal, and Public Interest Eras for regulating transportation safety could not eliminate all transportation accidents or even all transportation-related disasters, but it had the potential, if effectively implemented, to reduce the frequency of accidents and the extent of the resulting human carnage. By the end of the Public Interest Era, the federal government was well positioned to regulate the safety of transportation. As the population and the economy of the United States grew during the Laissez Faire Revival, the reality of safety regulation in the rapidly evolving transportation sector did not match its great potential.

Biology raises numerous issues that have social and humanistic implications. Bronowski arranged visits of the linguist Roman Jakobson, which are the origin of language studies at the institute. Bronowski was also director of the Council for Biology in Human Affairs (CBHA), created by Slater to examine the consequences of progress in biology. The CBHA made available special postdoctoral fellowships to Michael Jacobson, who founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and to Michael Crichton, the science-fiction writer. It promoted study groups in the areas of parasitic diseases and of bioethics of gene manipulations. It sponsored a visiting fellowship for Edgar Morin that led to the creation of the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de L’Homme.

A discussion of adversarial lawyering and how it played out in the civil rights struggle. The role of judges in the struggle, and the reticence of the academic legal community. The shifting burden of proof, with a focus on Jim Crow, the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and public interest lawyering.