Public Interest Law

When it comes to urban planning, to what extent and under what conditions should the community’s interest prevail over the rights of private property owners? Public Interest, Private Property addresses this question at a time when pollution, urban sprawl, and condo booms are forcing municipal governments to adopt prescriptive laws and regulations. Case studies focus on spheres in which public values and private property rights collide – expropriation law, natural resources regulation, green development, and water provision – laying the groundwork for more active debates on the issues currently shaping our cities.

What is public interest law? How effective is it? What are the limits to litigation as a mechanism for conflict resolution? In this study, economists, lawyers, and sociologists evaluate an institutional form that is new to American society and, indeed, to the world--the public interest law (PIL) organization. The book introduces the reader to the structure, resources, and activities of this "nonprofit industry," and also to the factors that affect PIL firms in their choices of cases and methods of handling them. The authors examine PIL's vast range of contemporary public policy concerns. These incude such general topics as the environment, consumerism, housing, employment discrimination, medical care, occupational health and safety, education finance, and taxation. A number of base studies are presented, and a method for economic analysis and evaluation is introduced and applied. The study points to PIL's success in advocating under-represented interests, in winning courtroom decisions, and in translating legal victories into reallocations of resources. At the same time, it notes the bias of PIL towards test-case litigation, a propensity to focus on judicial victories rather than on real social change, and a tendency to use lawyers even when other types of professionals might be more effective. Many of these problems stem from uncertainty of funding and legal restrictions on "nonprofit" organizations. The result is a set of hurdles that distracts PIL firms from their principal goals. The authors do not limit themselves to PIL, but comment on the effectiveness of legal instruments as devices for social change, and on the behavior of the voluntary nonprofit sector, a little-studied portion of the economy. The book presents a fresh approach to the study of both collective-type economic problems and institutional setting in which public interest law works. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

A new approach to developing and applying technology in the public interest.

Regulation of the media has traditionally been premised upon claims of 'the public interest', yet the term itself remains contested and generally ill defined. In the context of technological development and convergence, as well as corporate conglomeration, traditional 'public service' values in British broadcasting are challenged by market values. With such ongoing trends continuing apace, regulators must increasingly justify their interventions.The communication industries' commercialisation and privatisation pose a fundamental threat to democratic values. Media Regulation, Public Interest and the Law argues that regulators will only successfully protect such values if claims associated with 'citizenship' are recognised as the rationale and objective for the regulatory endeavour. While such themes are central to the book, this second edition has been substantially revised and updated, to take account of matters such as European Directives, the UK's Communications Act 2003, the process of reviewing the BBC's Charter, and relevant aspects of the reform of general competition law.Key Features*Identifies and examines the rationales underlying media regulation and the current challenges to them.*Considers fully the actual and potential utility of legal mechanisms and principles in the design and activities of regulatory institutions.*Fully updated to take account of the European Union's 2002 New Regulatory Framework and the UK's Communications Act 2003.*Accessible to a wide readership in media studies, journalism, broadcasting and law.Praise for the First Edition"e;A detailed and critical assessment of the problems and confusions of recent media regulation in the UK including digital television franchising and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission... it is well organised, and should be a useful resource for more advanced students and academics...for updating the public regulation case with vigour and clarity this book is to be welcomed."e;THES

Public Interest Lawyering is the first comprehensive analysis of public interest lawyering that is suitable as a law school elective text and/or advanced legal profession courses and seminars. Drawing upon a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this timely textbook examines the lives of public interest lawyers, the clients and causes they serve, the contexts within which they work, the strategies they deploy, and the challenges they face today. Features: The first comprehensive overview of the broad range of contemporary issues faced by public interest lawyers in any American law school text. Thorough discussion of important theoretical issues about the scope and definition of public interest lawyering. Addresses American public interest law from a historical perspective with focus on current issues. Expansive examination of the settings in which public interest practice occurs, including nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and private law firms. Presents the advantages and limits of different legal strategies in public interest practice, including lobbying, public education, community organizing, and community economic development. Addresses contemporary challenges of public interest law in context, including economics and financing, legal ethics, the role of legal education, and the globalization of public interest practice. Discusses critiques of public interest law, including a reflection about the role of lawyers in social movements that addresses contemporary critiques. Ethical obligations of public interest lawyers. Explores special issues related to lawyer-client relations in social change contexts. Extensive coverage of: Models of law reform organizations. Conservative cause lawyering. Government lawyers. The economics of social change lawyering. Global social change lawyering.

This book clarifies factors that play an important role in securing the effectiveness of legal regimes that aim to protect public interests of the international community. In Part 1, the authors focus on theoretical problems arising in the implementation process of those legal regimes from both a constitutional and functional perspective. In Parts 2 through Part 4, they pay attention to practical issues in the implementation process of particular legal regimes, in light of what interpretation or measures are legitimate from the perspective of protecting public interests. This book incorporates an idea of public law into the theoretical framework of international law which has been mainly constructed on the theory of private law in domestic legal systems. In contrast to many books which focus on the role of the procedural and material factors in the implementation process of various institutions and rules, this book emphasises the role of normative factors in securing effectiveness of public interests-oriented rules and is a valuable resource for both academics and policy makers working in this area.

This book analyses in a comprehensive manner the phenomenon of 'public interest' in different areas of law, both public and private. The contributions focus on the definition of public interest and the distinction between public and private interest. Further, they define the relevant 'public' and investigate the weight of public interest in case of conflict with other considerations and the legal consequences of its breach.