Description

On April 13-14, NUS Law hosted an international workshop to look at Martin Loughlin’s recent Foundations of Public Law (Oxford University Press, 2010). Foundations is ‘an account of the foundation of the discipline of public law with a view to identifying its essential character’. This book effectively refines the Anglophone discipline of public law, changing it from a court-centric doctrinal jurisprudence concerned with judicial review of state actions into what Loughlin refers to as a ‘political jurisprudence’ (a political ‘grammar’). The result is Anglophone legal world’s most ambitious attempt to affirmatively locate the place and role of politics in the national constitutional-legal order.

The workshop critically examine Foundations from a variety of perspectives, include theoretical perspective (e.g., the theory of the state, constitutional theory, the theory of political jurisprudence); the perspectives of particular regimes (e.g., ‘global-southern’ experience, the legal transnationalization, the EU); and from critical perspectives (.e.g., economic constitutionalism, the public-private divide, pluralism).