Privatization Vulnerability And Social Responsibility

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- 1 Introduction -- PART I Analyzing privatization -- 2 Three faces of privatization -- 3 Big government against social responsibility: A vulnerability critique of privatization's public priorities -- 4 Rethinking responsibility in private law -- 5 In the land of choice: Privatized reality and contractual vulnerability -- PART II Privatization and corporatization -- 6 Entrepreneurial subjectivity, the privatization of risk, and the ethics of vulnerability.

This book addresses how law and public policy cause or exacerbate vulnerability in individuals and groups. Bringing together scholars, judges and practitioners, it identifies how individuals and groups can become vulnerabilised through the operation of law, and examines how the State can acknowledge and remedy that impact. The book offers not only a theoretical, ethical and normative conception of vulnerability in law, but also an evaluation of the diverse practices of responding to vulnerability in law through accountability mechanisms and public campaigns. The analysis of vulnerability contained in this volume is enhanced by the common use of Ireland as a case study. Despite the robust rights protections available at national, regional and international level, Ireland remains a State where at risk people have experienced vulnerability across a range of thematic areas, such as criminal law, migration and asylum, historical abuse, LGBTI rights and austerity. Drawing on comparative analyses and a consideration of the role of international law in domestic settings, this book offers a comparison of diverse national and transnational attempts to ensure State accountability and responsiveness to legally created vulnerabilities. The book demonstrates lessons learned from theory and practice regarding how vulnerability can be experienced by individuals and groups, structured by law and addressed through legal and political action. This book will be of considerable interest to socio-legal and "law and society" scholars, as well as others working in international human rights, jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.

This volume explores the questions of what makes some goods and services fundamentally public and why.

This book considers how vulnerability theory provides the basis for a reconceptualization of the liberal ideas of autonomy, equality, and freedom. Vulnerability theory argues a “vulnerable legal subject” should displace the “liberal legal subject” that currently dominates law and policy. The theory is based on the fundamental empirical realities of the material body and offers an alternative to a social contract or rights-based notion of state responsibility, both of which tend to privilege abstractions such as rationality or dignity. A vulnerability analysis poses law and policy questions based on the “vulnerable legal subject” and requires new thinking about state or governmental responsibility. To achieve a truly comprehensive and inclusive notion of what constitutes social justice or a universal or common good, vulnerability theory mandates a reassessment of both equality and freedom as these concepts are currently conceived. Presenting the work of scholars from a wide range of doctrinal areas, it is this task that the book takes up. In particular, in recognizing that many social or institutional relationships entail uneven positions of dependence and reliance, it maintains that individualized notions of equality or freedom are inadequate and must be reformulated to include a sense of collective or social justice, incorporating asymmetric or unequal allocations of responsibility, and requiring appropriate limitations on the individual. This book’s reorientation of the subject, as well as the central objectives of law and policy, will appeal to scholars and students in law, vulnerability studies, gender studies, critical legal and political theory, politics, philosophy, and sociology.

The ageing population poses a huge challenge to law and society, carrying important structural and institutional implications. This book portrays elder law as an emerging research discipline in the European setting in terms of both conceptual and theoretical perspectives as well as elements of the law.

An original book offering a unique theoretical approach, Re-examining Insolvency Law and Theory analyses the important role that legal theory plays in the development of insolvency law. It explores how law and theory are able to respond to issues of financial distress in the 21st century and questions how insolvency law could develop to address contemporary challenges.

Vulnerability theory identifies structural and institutional factors that build or undermine the resilience of individuals and organisations. This volume uses vulnerability theory to explore how the organisation of the teaching and research activities of universities impact the resilience of academics and also how these activities themselves are impacted by contemporary developments in universities and educational policy. The starting point of enquiry is that neither academics nor universities are invulnerable, and that urgent attention is needed to reverse developments that undermine their resilience. The contributions focus on universities in the US and UK, legal education in the UK, criminal justice in the UK, Brazilian legal education, research in deprived communities, and the ethics of medical professionals. This broad range of subjects is connected by use of vulnerability theory to interrogate academic practices and universities as organisations which should build resilience in their workforce and communities and in so doing secure their own resilience, but which far too often fail to do so, and actually undermine resilience. It is argued this is not due to malefic intentions but to institutional features of the sector and society. Of immediate interest to anyone who works in, studies at, or relies upon the research mission of universities, and to those involved in the management of universities, this book will also be relevant to policy analysts and policymakers, who will find value in the reframing of vital issues in higher education policy by vulnerability theory, allowing a more realistic and productive policy environment to develop. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Law Teacher.

Taking up the concept of vulnerability, this book examines the gendered impact of market-based procurement practices. In recent years, ideological shifts and real managerial constraints have forced states everywhere to rely on private resources to solve public problems. Focusing on instances where the state retains ownership of assets and rights, even if it temporarily devolves its authority to a private entity (profit or non-profit), this book uncovers the ways in which these private actors are not just suppliers of materials goods, but increasingly policy influencers. More specifically, the book focuses on the gendered dynamics within the law, policy, and practice of public procurement and investigates how vulnerability is conceptualized and coded in the process of public acquisition of works, goods, and services from private suppliers. In this book, a series of rich case studies from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe show how vulnerability theory can inform the design of public institutions that are more responsible and responsive to gender-informed demands for social justice. This is the first book to integrate vulnerability theory into public procurement studies in global and comparative perspectives, and it will appeal to scholars and others with interests in gendered dynamics in law and society, international development, public policy, and international political economy.