The term “the public interest” is oft-cited but seldom defined. It is in essence both an umbrella term and a short-hand for a concept (or concepts) that we know we need to understand but have difficulty explaining. However, given both the prevalence and the importance of the concept to the law in specific disputes, confronting its essential nature becomes imperative to resolving those clashes. One such instance comes in the form of the conflict of privacy and a free press. One of the foremost legal problems of our time, the clash of Article 8 and Article 10 rights does not lend itself to simple resolutions given the frequency of what might be described as ‘intractable’ or ‘zero-sum’ cases – where both rights cannot be simultaneously realised to the satisfaction of the parties involved. This thesis therefore seeks to understand where the elusive ‘public interest’ lies in such cases. To do so it firstly examines where the public interest is located in each of the respective rights, and then how those rights are to be balanced. This thesis contends that it is not enough simply to understand the nature of the two rights which are being balanced, but that it is crucial to understand how the act of balancing itself impacts upon the outcome. All of this cannot be divorced from the wider social and political context in which the contest between conflicting rights takes place. This thesis therefore systematically examines each of these pieces of the puzzle to garner an in depth understanding of them individually and how they react with each other. This is done in order to produce a set tools – definitions, understandings, and conclusions – which can be applied to factual situations in order to illuminate the location of the public interest in conflicts between privacy and a free press.

This thesis, inquiring into the permissibility of long-term incarceration, maintains that two sets of reasons determine the moral limits of punishment. First, the reasons that justify the infliction of penal harm will only license "proportionate" or "parsimonious" means of realizing our penal aims. Part I, searching for these reasons, conceives of the criminal law as a system of protections, upon which all citizens rely for their assured liberty. An offender weakens this system by contributing to the threat of "criminality." The state is thereby entitled, and only entitled, to harm him as a means of "erasing" his criminality contributions, generally by deterring would-be future offenders. This precludes long-term incarceration in most, but not all cases, given the tenuous relationship between penal severity and deterrence. The second set of reasons opposes degrading punishments. Is long-term incarceration impermissibly degrading, irrespective of its proportionality or usefulness otherwise? Part II gains traction by considering torture, the exemplar of degrading treatment. I define torture as the intentional infliction of a suffusive panic. I argue that it is egregiously "disrespectful" of the human capacity to realize value. It converts a diachronic being capable of building a good life through time into a synchronic being whose awareness is restricted to a maximally terrible present. Meanwhile, a prison sentence is "long-term," I argue, if it severely risks ruining an inmate's life, just in virtue of the amount of time that he is separated from society and thereby deprived of certain associational goods (e.g. a family and career). Long-term incarceration for reasons of retribution or deterrence intentionally inflicts this life-ruining harm. It is thus impermissibly disrespectful of a person's value-generating capacities, I conclude, akin to penal torture. Long-term incarceration for the reason of incapacitation, however, whereby the state is not motivated to harm the offender, can be legitimate.

This thesis explores the origins of the pirate in international legal thought. It takes as its starting point the recent wave of piracy off the coast of Somalia, mapping the image of the pirate constructed by contemporary legal commentators. The figure of the pirate that takes shape is the archetype of illegitimacy and epitome of enmity in international law: hostis humani generis. Where and when did this figure first emerge in international legal thought? My argument is twofold. First, against dominant transhistorical accounts which project the pirate backwards in an unbroken arc from the present to antiquity, I show that its juridical identity has been marked by fundamental discontinuities and transformations. Second, I locate the construction of a distinctly modern figure of the pirate in the emergence of a capitalist world economy in the long 16th century. The pirate's universal enmity, I suggest, was initially religious in nature, an ideology rooted in inter-imperial rivalries confronting Habsburg Spain with Ottoman, in the Mediterranean, and Protestant, in the Atlantic, threats to a universalising Christendom. With the development of an early capitalist economy and the growing coincidence of imperial interests with trade, the image of the pirate began to change. In the work of Grotius, I argue, its enmity was transformed, the pirate rendered not as religious foe, but as enemy of a universal right to commerce. It is this new secular figure of enmity, the thesis concludes, that is produced and reproduced in modern legal thought.

This thesis investigates how the natural environment is conceptualised in international law. Environmental campaigners typically place great faith in the discipline's ability to restrain the onset of growing 'global' problems: such as species extinctions, clearing of forests, pollution, and climate change. Law has traditionally been a key domain for efforts to regulate, and curb, these problems. While a vast body of existing literature assesses the effectiveness and adequacy of these initiatives, this dissertation takes a different approach. It explores particular visions of the natural environment that inform such initiatives. I will proceed from the premise that international law, rather than merely reflecting the natural environment, shapes how we perceive it. With this in mind, I will investigate a selection of stories that international law tells about the natural environment, and consider the different, competing stories it deprivileges. The key question is: what role has international law played in making certain ways of thinking about nature come to seem normal or intuitive, and how does this affect efforts to curb environmental harms? Adopting historical and philosophical approaches informed by critical approaches to law, I will show how dominant manifestations of nature are articulated-and sustained-with regard to ideas of mastery and resources, national economies and conservation, the (human) environment, sustainable development, the green economy, and natural capital. I will use insights from radical ecological and postcolonial theory to highlight the ramifications of such conceptualisations. My discussion will focus on a series of key episodes in the history of international environmental law, as well as on the work of prominent scholars and institutions in the field of international environmental law. I will argue that international law is constrained in its efforts to deal with environmental problems insofar as the discipline is itself complicit in the use, abuse, and subjugation of environments. Furthermore, I will contend that the idea of the environment is continually reconstructed and repositioned, in ways that sustain a certain relationship, or form of global ordering. As we shall observe, debates in international fora over the scope and meaning of the environment fostered anxieties about the degree to which it was being adequately protected. Yet, I will suggest, these were neutralised-or co-opted-in ways that reinforced dominant logics. Put simply, international law and institutions have sustained a narrow understanding-or framing-of the environment. Ultimately, it has confined the outcomes of environmental policies to a set of largely predetermined outcomes. This undermines international law's contingency and potential dynamism. Added to this, is the implication that such framings are designed to preserve the power and privilege of a small minority of the world's peoples.

This thesis studies the justifications for constitutional unamendability. First, it introduces the basic concepts and distinctions regarding constitutional unamendability, and explains its theoretical and judicial origins, and the arguments against constitutional unamendability. Then, it conceptualises the most common justification of unamendability as ‘the organic justification’ by drawing on Carl Schmitt’s distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws. The thesis criticises the organic justification for its reliance on the idea of constituent power and for indifference to the substantive constitutional content protected by unamendability. The thesis then advances the idea of ‘evaluative constitutional unamendability’. It does so by drawing on Lon Fuller’s distinction of the morality of aspiration and the morality of duty, his idea of the purposefulness of the legal enterprise, and John Finnis’s methodology of attention to evaluation in description. The thesis presents constitutionality as a quality and conceptualises constitutional unamendability as constitutionalism’s morality of duty. The thesis also introduces a case study on Turkey. It studies the birth and entrenchment of the core values of the Turkish constitution, and how they have become the norms of reference in assessing the constitutionality of constitutional amendments. The thesis argues that the Turkish Constitutional Court has adopted the organic justification in its conceptualisation of constitutional unamendability and in its interpretation of its authority over constitutional amendments. It also hypothesises that the Turkish Constitutional Court could have struck down the 2017 constitutional amendment from the perspective of evaluative constitutional unamendability.

It has been increasingly argued that international commercial arbitration is stripping off its intrinsic features of an alternative dispute resolution method and turning into a mechanism that is almost indistinguishable from litigation. The development describing the metamorphosis of international commercial arbitration into a method that is very similar in process and substance to national litigation is referred to as the judicialisation of international commercial arbitration. The focus of this research is the process of judicialisation. The thesis questions whether it exists at all and, if yes, to what extent it has permeated both international arbitration proceedings and arbitral decision-making. While attempting to answer those questions other salient considerations are raised, such as: • Which characteristics of international commercial arbitration are fundamental for this method of dispute resolution and should remain intact; • What are the driving forces of the process of judicialisation; • Is the judicialised approach entirely consistent with the benefits of international commercial arbitration and to what extent? The ultimate objective of this thesis is to answer the question whether the judicialisation of international commercial arbitration is a positive development and thus be encouraged. Where negative implications are recognised, an attempt is made to identify the causes of the judicialisation process and offer solutions, if attainable.

The Maritime Labour Convention amendments concerning abandonment of seafarers are expected to come into force in 2017, something long sought by seafarers’ representatives. The Convention is already considered a success, being referred to as a ‘super convention’ or ‘seafarers’ bill of rights’, and the amendments are expected to receive a similar reception. Although it is an international legal instrument, the Maritime Labour Convention also establishes, for contracting states, soft guidelines on how its provisions should be implemented. The Convention recognises that the seafarer is a transnational worker in that different states are entitled to adopt varying approaches to achieving the objectives of the law where the seafarer is concerned. It is argued in this thesis that seafarers are transnational workers, hence that ‘abandonment of seafarers’ is a transnational phenomenon. That in turn means that the concept should not be confined merely to current international legal definitions. From a legal point of view, abandonment is a contractual breach committed by the employer. From a moral point of view, it is the employer severing their responsibility for their employees. Although this analysis is made largely through an English law lens, legislations of different countries are also studied. The evaluation undertaken in this study proves that there is in reality only a nominal differences between the legal rules of these countries in this area. The thesis will also assert that third parties in the employer-worker relationship, the so-called ‘private actors’, also have responsibilities in preventing abandonment from occurring, or in providing assistance when abandonment does happen. These private actors are essentially those persons involved in the maritime trade network – including those having responsibility for safety, such as flag states, port states, classification societies and P&I Clubs. In this regard, it is also stressed in this thesis that substandard shipping is directly connected to abandonment of seafarers; indeed, the Maritime Labour Convention should thus be seen as an important tool to help combat substandard shipping.

The European Union recently adopted a Defence Procurement Directive. Designed to regulate an internal market for defence material, the development is highly controversial. For many years, the U.S. has received privileged access to the national defence markets of the Member States. A lack of competition has resulted in stagnated markets with decreased increased possibilities of dependence on the U.S. In respective to the Directive, U.S. commentators have identified the possibility for its provisions to discriminate against U.S. contractors. This forces a fundamental assessment of the role of legal institutions which regulate transatlantic defence trade. This thesis aims to subject the EU and U.S. defence procurement regimes to critical description and analysis.

This thesis considers the question ‘who is a refugee’ and suggests how one might answer this in the context of international refugee law. The theories of Robert Alexy’s are adopted as a lens through which to reconstruct refugee law. The case for viewing human rights as worthy of special protection is put forward and the implications for refugee law are considered. It posits a special status for human rights that gives refugees’ claims high priority. This rejects the notion that states have absolute discretion to control borders. This claim is strengthened when one considers the nature of the claim to human rights protection made by refugees: protection from persecution. This ties refugeehood to political legitimacy, a concept evolving through notions such as Responsibility to Protect, to demand higher standards of human rights protection. This, in turn, requires the Refugee Convention to evolve to maintain its protective scope. This thesis will use notion of collective violence to demonstrate that article 1(2) is conceptually capable of supporting this required expansive notion of ‘refugee’ whilst retaining the boundary between ‘refugee’ and ‘refugee-like.’ It will show also how this reconstruction of refugeehood dismantles many of the obstacles to recognition facing female refugees.

Taciturn bills of rights and constitutions – texts that express concepts at high levels of abstraction or which do not provide much guidance in other ways – pose challenges for courts responsible for determining their meaning and applying them. This dissertation aims to identify the approach that might be taken by courts in Commonwealth jurisdictions with written constitutions. It argues that the starting point is the legislative intention underlying the text, and that the preferred conception of such an intention is moderate originalism. This requires ascertainment of the meaning the legislators imbued the text with through their choice of words at the time the constitution was enacted, but which recognizes that parts of the text may be interpreted dynamically where language connoting abstract moral principles has been employed. The dissertation distinguishes constitutional interpretation from constitutional construction. Interpretation involves identifying the semantic content of a constitutional text, and to do so courts should consider the linguistic, purposive and applicative meanings of terms and provisions. Where interpreting the text does not yield any useful or complete legal rule, the court must engage in construction by applying legal principles and techniques such as the presumption in favour of generosity, the use of constitutional implications, and a proportionality analysis. Thus, any constitutional ‘silence’ is in fact not so silent after all, as it may be given voice by the court.