The Radical Advocacy of Wendell Phillips: Abolitionism, Democracy, and Public Interest Law by Peter Charles Hoffer (review)

Antitrust as Public Interest Law: Redistribution, Equity, and Social Justice

Abstract The public interest suggests a singular approach to a social good, but lessons from history illustrate the nuances of sharing open space, transportation networks, and policy mandates. Serving the public exists across a spectrum of possibilities. In this essay, we consider how the emerging field of public interest technology could learn from previous assumptions about who counts as the public and how benefits or harms can be overly concentrated in certain populations. We situate public interest technology as a growing capability of government public service, an institutionalized professional practice like public interest law, as well as a site of critical inquiry. Our definition of the public interest is motivated by a theory of change that recognizes the strength of inclusion. Punctuated with historic and contemporary examples, this essay argues that by acknowledging conflicts of interest and embracing the marginal, public interest technology could build ethical infrastructures to serve all.

The article provides a historical and legal characterization of the institution of a Public Interest Litigation in general and in the context of administrative proceedings. The author reveals the historical origins of this institute from the time of Roman law, where it was called “actio popularis”. Some of the most common constructions of such claims in Roman law are highlighted. The author emphasizes the public benefit of filing such claims despite their private law nature. The author emphasizes the dualism between private and public interests in law, which is particularly evident in the institution of a Public Interest Litigation. The terminology used in different legal systems to describe the institution of a public interest action or its individual varieties is revealed: “actio popularis”, “Public Interest Litigation”, “Public Interest Law”, “Social Interest Litigation”. The author outlines the main areas in which Public Interest Litigation is most often applied: environmental protection, anti-discrimination, etc. The author analyzes the reasons for the low interest in the institution of public interest litigation in previous historical periods in Ukraine. On the other hand, it is suggested that there has been a significant increase in interest in such lawsuits in recent years, which is due to certain factors. These include: the development of civil society and the increased interest of legislators in this institution, as well as the ratification by Ukraine of the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention). The last point was important in the context of the further adoption by the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court of the decision of 11.12.2018 in case No. 910/8122/17, which stated the right of environmental associations to file lawsuits in the public interest on these matters. The article concludes with the emphasis on the prospects for further research into the application of actio popularis in foreign jurisdictions with a view to exploring the possibilities for expanding the number of legal relations in which such claims may be filed in Ukraine.

In the Republic of Indonesia, legal norms and rules prioritize the public interest over state, group, and individual interests. Article 310 paragraph (3) of the Criminal Code allows for the removal of offenses committed in the public interest. However, using the public interest as a justification for press activities can lead to controversy due to unreliable or false news sources. Law No. 40 of 1999 concerning the Press, and the Press Council, an independent regulatory body established in 1966, protect press freedom and regulate the press according to the Journalistic Code of Ethics. However, due to perceived inadequacies, press violations are often resolved through press releases rather than relying on the Code as a legal basis. A normative legal research method was used to analyze the relationship between the Criminal Code and the Press Law, revealing that press freedom is a fundamental human right protected by the Constitution. The Press Law functions as a Lex specialis of the Criminal Code, addressing issues such as defamation, insults, and ridicule, and resolving disputes within the press while prioritizing the public interest over government interests. Keywords: Public Interest, Freedom of the Press

The work deals with the issues of determining the balance of private (individual) and public (state) interests in terms of admissibility of limiting human rights and freedoms in cases where it increases or prevents threats to national security. This was the aim of the study, as this issue has become highly relevant because of the growing number of hybrid threats to national security, which can be countered through the introduction of separate restrictions on human rights by the state. The systemic approach, the hermeneutic, and doctrinal approach were used to conclude that almost all constitutions, constitutional acts and constitutional laws of the EU and NATO member states provide for the possibility of restricting human rights. Such restrictions are imposed for the purposes of national security, public necessity or national interests of the state. Moreover, the list of cases where the restrictions on civil rights may be applied in the national security interests in national legislation is often much wider than in international legal acts. This demonstrates the primacy of national interests over individual interests, which is defined by national legislators as the common good at the constitutional level. The lack of detailed cases and models of state response to these processes determines the conclusions on the need to introduce a system of legally determined conditions for the application of restrictive measures. That is why further research should focus on identifying and detailing the criteria for applying measures to restrict civil rights for the purposes of national security at the constitutional level.
 
 Received: 15 May 2023 / Accepted: 21 June 2023 / Published: 5 July 2023

Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in Government and Public Interest law (GPI), where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multi-wave, panel survey of law students, we take advantage of a unique tuition remission intervention that occurred at the founding of UCI Law, resulting in a natural, quasi-experiment. Using OLS regression and an instrumental variables approach, we ask whether law student debt influences the likelihood that students (1) will launch their careers in the GPI and (2) aspire to the GPI sector five years after graduation. We find little to no evidence that student debt is a barrier to a graduate's decision to take a position in the GPI sector at career launch or that debt is a factor in a graduate's career aspirations at UCI law school during the study period. These counterintuitive findings provoke new questions about our understanding of debt in the context of legal education and the types of interventions that might facilitate greater entry into the public sector.

The South African legal aid scheme experience is a useful model for small and developing countries because it has tried numerous models of delivery and operates on a modest per capita annual expenditure. In most Commonwealth countries judicare, supplemented by pro bono work, is the most common form of delivery of legal aid services. The South African scheme illustrates how a combination of public defenders, including intern public defenders, and judicare can be used to operate justice centres that deliver a full range of legal aid services. It also shows how cooperative agreements between the Legal Aid Board and university law clinics,public interest law firms and paralegals can be used to supplement legal aid services, particularly in civil matters.

In Baby Jails, Philip G. Schrag, currently Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law at Georgetown University and Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies, examines the United States’ detention of migrant children from the Jenny Lisette Flores case (1985) through the Trump administration. Schrag focuses primarily on Mexican and Central American migrant children to isolate three mechanisms through which the United States has addressed children seeking asylum: “humanitarian release, long-term detention, and family separation” (p. 7). Driven by his experience advising asylum applicants in Texas, Schrag attends to a number of detention facilities, including the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Taylor, Texas; Artesia Family Residential Center in Artesia, New Mexico; Karnes County Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas; South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas; and Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Over the course of twelve chapters (as well as a conclusion and epilogue), Schrag excels in fulfilling his purpose: to examine the Flores case and its legacies as well as attempts to halt or otherwise reform migrant child detention (p. 5).Schrag communicates this history through clear prose that outlines decades of lawsuits and government policymaking in a manner accessible to those outside the legal profession; he deftly references legal proceedings, journalistic accounts, and reports from non-governmental and advocacy organizations as well as interviews with many of the attorneys central to this history. Particularly helpful are the sub-sections within each chapter, which are dedicated to, for example, detailing arguments made at various hearings or legislative developments. While Schrag's inclusion of major figures’ biographical information adds to the text's length, these details contribute to the monograph's comprehensive nature.Beginning with three chapters dedicated to the Flores case (originally filed in 1985 as Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese III), Schrag describes how a suit intended to establish reforms in detention practices resulted in two separate settlement agreements and a Supreme Court decision. The second Flores agreement (1997), among other things, placed limits on where and for how long children could be detained and provided for their access to services such as education and counseling (p. 58). Although the settlement was slated to end after five years (or three years, provided the INS met the detailed standards), it remained in effect to meet the Trump administration's challenges in 2018 (pp. 59–60). Schrag's assessment of how the Flores agreement then differentially affected unaccompanied and accompanied migrant children is one of his strongest contributions.For example, in his analysis of Hutto, which the Bush administration opened to detain mothers and their children, Schrag discusses litigation that asserted, in part, that the government violated the Flores agreement by detaining children in improper facilities without the necessary services; the attorneys called for the release of both the mothers and their children (p. 93). However, per a judge's order, enforcing the limits on child detention could have meant the separation of children from their detained parents (p. 96). This case thus revealed tensions in the Flores agreement: “that Flores didn't apply to parents, and that it didn't apply to children who had crossed the border along with parents or other adults” (p. 99). Further accounts of lawsuits pertaining to the enforcement of the Flores agreement at other detention facilities follow in subsequent chapters and are interwoven with an analysis of other measures intended to protect certain migrant children. For example, under the Obama administration, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) protected unaccompanied minors from expedited removal while accompanied minors faced hasty deportation and detention in the remote Artesia facility as part of an effort to deter migration (p. 134). Schrag navigates the reader through this legal landscape, drawing comparisons between different populations and facilities and producing an excellent account of migrant child detention.Baby Jails raises important questions about how this history intersects with ongoing conversations about migrant protest and advocacy, crimmigration, and other instances of migrant child detention. For example, while Schrag mentions a 2015 hunger strike at Karnes (p. 146), future research can ask how migrants, especially children, protested their treatment through legal or other means. Additionally, while Schrag briefly discusses the separation of Haitian families detained at Guantánamo, he leaves that case relatively unaddressed and does not mention the experiences of Haitian unaccompanied minors detained there between 1994 and 1995 (pp. 225–26). Nevertheless, Baby Jails is an important work which complements other recent scholarship on family separation, especially Laura Briggs's Taking Children: A History of American Terror (2020). Baby Jails should appeal to scholars of history, sociology, and law interested in migration, childhood, and Latino/a studies as well as individuals seeking to understand how migrant child detention operates in the United States.

Attorney Sudha Setty is excited to return to New York City, where she attended Columbia Law School and started her legal career. Having been in academic law since 2006 and dean of Western New England University School of Law in Massachusetts since 2018, Setty had not envisioned a return to NYC, but the opportunity to lead a public interest law school proved irresistible. As of July 1, she will be the dean of the CUNY (City University of New York) School of Law, New York City's only publicly funded law school.

There are many domains of human endeavor which invoke the “public interest,” for example, environmental sustainability, law, journalism, and, perhaps most pointedly in 2020–2021, health. All of these domains require some sort of tradeoff between different and potentially competing stakeholder priorities. For example, public interest in environmental sustainability, with respect to air quality, potable water, and arable land, can be in contention with requirements of manufacturing, transport, and consumer demand. Advocacy for social justice through public interest law might set a disadvantaged or disempowered group against a privileged or powerful one <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> . Similarly, journalistic reporting in the public interest must consider holding the powerful accountable for their actions and decisions and the potential impact on society against basic rights to privacy and ethical practices in investigative journalism. Choices in public health sometimes appeal to the concept of procedural justice and can involve a multiperspective tradeoff between individual risk and collective benefit, personal preference and state mandate, financial costs and effectiveness of treatments, and speed and caution (and note these <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">are</i> tradeoffs not false dichotomies, as some would have it).

This special issue is dedicated to the theme of public interest technology (PIT) [1]. PIT acknowledges that technological potential can be harnessed to satisfy the needs of civil society. In other words, technology can be seen as a public good that can benefit all, through an open democratic system of governance, with open data initiatives, open technologies, and open systems/ecosystems designed for the collective good, as defined by respective communities that will be utilizing them. Just like in the established field of public interest law (PIL) [2], [3] and public interest journalism (PIJ) [4], we can consider potential fields around the idea of PIT [5], [6], such as public interest co-design (PITco), even public interest engagement (PITengage) or public interest consulting (PIC). For decades, public interest engineers (PIEs) have volunteered their time to collaborate in meaningful participative engagements. These engineers have self-organized some impressive collectives including Engineers Without Borders, ASCE Disaster Assistance Volunteer Program, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, Architecture for Humanity, Bridges to Prosperity, Bridging the Gap Africa, Engineers for a Sustainable World, GISCorps, Habitat for Humanity, National Engineering Projects in Community Service, just to name a few. These collectives and initiatives call attention to the primary role of a PIT practitioner. That is, the importance of PIT practitioners serving as transdisciplinary intermediaries between the community and the STEM disciplines and technical teams, emphasizing the importance of justice, equity, and inclusion in the design and deployment of new technologies [7] that allow for positive social transformation and empowerment [8].

In our globalizing world, Public Interest law has been accepted and incorporated by a large number of nations into their legal systems for advancing towards a world or a nation that provides social justice for all. This research article examines the emergence of public interest law as a global tool for global justice. The article studies the factors shaping the global path for Public Interest law and also study the impacts of globalization which have redefined the public law systems such as; the dynamic change in the magnitude of migration, the evolution of open economy market policies and institutes, and the rise and fight for international human rights. In addition, the article will discuss the evolution of Public Interest law which is Public Interest law as a global institution for providing global justice and Public Interest law as a global governance technique which will be efficient in resolving transnational conflicts or infringements. The article will also discuss the arena of public interest law in a globalizing world, its strategies and constructs.

Abstract This study introduces an evidence‐centered approach to reverse design for languages for specific purposes (LSP) courses called domain analysis. The article describes the research framework and its potential to provide consistent empirical rigor to the necessarily decentralized field of LSP by reporting on one study using domain analysis in the legal Spanish context. The research questions examine the parameters of the domain under study—legal Spanish for law students at one university—and the target functional outcomes for those students. The results included parameters that were limited to public interest law in the U.S. context. Eight topic areas emerged as central to that context and functional outcomes were identified for reading, listening, and speaking. Though sight translation was a necessary skill, writing was not needed in the domain.

Time-In-Cell 2019: A Snapshot of Restrictive Housing based on a Nationwide Survey of U.S. Prison Systems is the fourth national survey of its kind co-authored by the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA), formerly known as the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA), and by the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School. The topic is “restrictive housing,” often termed “solitary confinement,” and defined as separating prisoners from the general population and holding them in cells for an average of 22 hours or more per day for 15 continuous days or more. This report estimates that between 55,000 and 62,500 prisoners in the United States were held in restrictive housing as of the summer of 2019. Time-In-Cell 2019 is based on survey responses from thirty-nine state prison systems providing data on 825,473 prisoners. These states reported housing a total of 31,542 individuals—or 3.8% of the total prison population in those jurisdictions—in solitary confinement. Across the set of thirty-nine states, percentages of the prisoners held in isolation varied from 11% to none, as four states said they no longer keep anyone in those conditions. The length of time individuals spent in restrictive housing varied widely. In the thirty-three states that captured this information, they reported that 46% of the individuals held in solitary confinement were there for three months or less. At the other end of the spectrum, almost 3,000 people—or 11% of all the people for which statistics were provided—had been kept in solitary confinement for more than three years. Two areas of special concern are the impact of mental illness and race on placement in restrictive housing. Using their own definition of “serious mental illness,” 33 states reported a total of more than 3,000 SMI prisoners in solitary confinement. Six jurisdictions reported that more than 10% of their prisoners in solitary confinement had a serious mental illness. Aggregating the numbers from 32 states and disaggregating by gender, Black and Hispanic men were somewhat more likely to be put into restrictive housing than white men: 43% of Black men and 17% of Hispanic men were in restrictive housing, compared to 40% and 15% respectively in the total male custodial population. Black women were much more likely to be placed in isolation: 42% of women reported to be in solitary confinement were Black, as compared to 22% of the total female custodial population. The report also provides an overview of litigation, legislation, and policy developments regarding the use of restrictive housing since 2018 both within and beyond the United States. Many of these changes focus on limiting the use of isolation for pregnant women, juveniles, and seriously mentally ill individuals.Time-In-Cell 2019 compares the responses of the 33 prison systems that answered the CLA-Liman surveys in 2015, 2017, and 2019. See ASCA-Liman, Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 ASCA-Liman Nationwide Survey of Time-in-Cell, SSRN No. 3264350; ASCA-Liman, Aiming to Reduce Time-in-Cell (Nov. 2016), SSRN No. 2874492. Comparing percentages of prisoners held in restrictive housing in the 33 jurisdictions reporting during the last five years, the median was 4.9% in 2016; 4.0% in 2018, and 3.4% in 2019. The data in this report was collected before COVID-19, which in the future will introduce complicated questions about what distinguishes restrictive housing conditions from medical quarantine. These topics must be addressed by further research.

This chapter reviews the role of civil society and human rights defenders in holding corporations to account. Civil society plays numerous roles in corporate accountability. It is civil society that is often first to take heed of a situation, first on the ground, and first to expose the issue to the wider public. The mobilization of civil society therefore often foreshadows shifts in both legal and business practices. Civil society uses a wide variety of tactics, from engagement in multistakeholder regulation and intracorporate consultancy and collaboration, to exposing wrongdoing and organizing protests. The chapter takes a broad understanding of the definition of civil society, allowing it to introduce a range of actors including, inter alia, benchmarking organizations, labour movements, public interest law groups and shareholder activists. Human rights defenders are viewed more narrowly to focus on those at the dangerous frontlines of human rights protection. Case studies of Pavel Sulyandziga in Russia and Berta Caceres in Honduras are used to demonstrate the evident risks from both state and private sector actors. The chapter also discusses some of the tactics business uses to weaken civil society participation, and concludes with a discussion of the rationales and possibilities for more positive engagement by businesses in protecting the protectors of human rights.

At this conference on comparative perspectives on public interest litigation, I speak to you today as someone whose primary focus has been on the American public interest law system, and my comment...

While European Union (EU) competition law has long been understood as a variety of public interest law, the extent to which the rules can be applied directly to advance noneconomic public interest-oriented goals is more contentious. This contribution considers whether and how such concerns can be accommodated within the framework of Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). It considers both the conventional approach to addressing public interest concerns within the analytical structure of the antitrust rules and also how broader public interest objectives have shaped recent EU-level enforcement efforts in three key sectors: the liberalizing public utilities markets, the pharmaceutical sector, and the digital economy.

The dynamics of the contemporary South African legal profession have many roots in the events of the last 30 years. These were momentous times -- from the 1980s state of emergency through the transition from apartheid to the constitutional democracy of the 1990s and then to the decidedly more uncertain present. To a large extent, the last three decades are a story of what has not happened. The legal profession has not transformed to the extent many imagined, hoped, or feared. The slow pace of demographic change has been matched by that of other transformations -- educational, pro-competitive, and regulatory -- all of which affect the legal profession. After sketching the current structure of the legal profession, this chapter in a forthcoming multi-volume survey of legal professions around the world investigates these four processes as well as other developments significant for lawyering in South Africa. It concludes after briefly touching on access to justice and public interest law.

This article proposes the use of antitrust law to reduce poverty and address inequality. It argues that the antitrust laws are sufficiently malleable to achieve such goals. The current focus of antitrust on the efficiency-only goals does not only lead to increasing inequality further but is also inconsistent with the history of antitrust. This history is presented through the lens of the public interest that emerges into the balance between private property and competition policy. Tracing the public interest at different historical moments, we get to see how it has been broad enough to encompass social welfare concerns. Over time, the public interest concern of antitrust was narrowed to exclusively cover consumer welfare and its allocative efficiency. Once we frame antitrust as public interest law, in its broadest sense, we are empowered to use it to address inequality. A proposal to do so is exposed in this article.