This thesis sets out an argument as to the principles which should determine the scope of public order crimes. The Preface demonstrates that the definition and scope of public order and corresponding public order crimes are arbitrary. In order to arrive at a clear definition of public order interests which can be applied in limiting the scope of offences against public order, in the first chapter the substantive elements of public order are constructed as categories of life convenience, comfort and peace, while the formal publicness is demarcated as multiple subjects of an interest as opposed to one specified subject of the interest. Taking Feinberg’s moral limits of criminalisation as its starting point, the second chapter restates the concepts of ‘harm to others’ and ‘offence to others’ as criminalisation frameworks applicable to public order crimes. In order to justify criminalisation, harm should be an objective, recognisable, imputable and wrongful setback to a physical interest, while offence should be a communicative, imputable and wrongful setback to inner peace based on normative sensibilities. Accordingly, harm/offence to the interests of others in smooth civil life is the moral basis for forming and shaping rules of criminalising disruptions of public order. The third chapter categorises problems of imputing public disorder and public offence and approaches these problems by proposing a formal test of substantial risk and, if necessary, a substantive test of counterbalancing justification. In order to address the problems of public order law in practice, the final two chapters apply the principles developed in the thesis to a number of typical public order problems. These chapters demonstrate that the valid scope of criminalising typical public order related conduct such as disorderly begging, loitering, indecencies and insults can be sensibly determined by the argued steps of limiting criminalisation. These two chapters identify some categories of truly intrusive and wrongful conduct that correspond to legal interests in convenience and comfort and inner peace.

Litigants in Person [LiPs] have a poor reputation in legal scholarship. Routinely labelled ‘pests’, ‘nuts’, ‘weirdos’, and worse, LiPs are often posited as a problem for the courts. This perception has only been aggravated by the passage of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act in April 2013 which ended legal aid for the majority of litigants in non-criminal cases. And yet, despite these pejorative attitudes, we know surprisingly little about LiPs. Historically marginalised in scholarship, LiPs are rarely spoken about, and almost never spoken to. This thesis sets out in part to redress this by putting their experiences at the centre of this research. Drawing on fifteen oral history life stories with LiPs, this thesis asks: what is going to law like for them? In addition to adding LiP experiences to the record, though, this thesis also sets out to consider what LiP experiences can tell us about access to justice. This thesis contends that LiPs face far more challenging difficulties than has heretofore been recognised in research. Moreover, this thesis argues that these difficulties are, counter to popular perception, not problems inherent to LiPs, but are instead indicative of systemic inadequacies in the civil justice system itself, a system which theoretically provides access for LiPs but which excludes them in all meaningful ways. Ultimately, I argue that until reform addresses the systematic inequality embedded in the civil justice system, LiPs are doomed to fail.

This thesis seeks to explain the lax enforcement of tax laws in Egypt. While I acknowledge that existing explanations emphasising amongst other things the importance of low administrative capacity, neopatrimonialism, or rentseeking may discern some of the drivers of tax collection performance, I claim that other factors have been neglected. Based on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, I show how historical legacies and contemporary political dynamics intertwine and shape taxation at the three levels of microlevel tax relations, intra-bureaucratic relations, and the administrative and political leadership. I argue that deep-seated distrust on the one hand, and the consequences of a persistent but broken social contract on the other, contribute to the lax enforcement of tax laws. I show how repressive statebuilding resulted in a legacy of distrust that became institutionalised over time and that permeates tax relations to this day. I also explain how post-colonial populist state-building has led to the formation of moral economies of a “caretaker state”, widely-held norms, expectations and beliefs with respect to what the state should do for its citizens and its employees. The persistence of core aspects of this social contract until this day, in combination with its breaking by the state, shapes state and bureaucratic politics in important ways. On the one hand, tax collectors are in many different ways less inclined to do their jobs effectively and to strictly enforce the law against their fellow citizens. On the other hand, lenient enforcement is influenced by regime fears that the strict application of tax laws could provide a trigger for regimethreatening popular mobilisation. These findings make a number of different contributions to the literatures on taxation in developing countries, everyday governance and the enforcement of laws, as well as Middle East political science. Most crucially however, my research shows that both distrust and normative-ideational factors have to be taken seriously not only when it comes to explaining the willingness of taxpayer to pay, but also the willingness of tax collectors to collect.

This thesis addresses the long-debated question of courts’ proper role in enforcing constitutional social rights; and it does so from a new perspective – that of political trust. Its central argument is that the concept of political trust – as it has been conceptualised and theorised in the relevant social science literature – has normative potential for defining such a role for courts. Specifically, I argue that courts, in enforcing constitutional social rights, can, and should, use political trust as an adjudicative tool, employing it to develop a standard to which government, in its provision of social goods and services to the public, can and will be held. To make out this argument, I draw on both theoretical and empirical social science scholarship on trust and how it functions in contemporary societies. I suggest, based on that scholarship, that we can expect constitutional social rights adjudication by courts to be able to impact (and in the right circumstances, to foster) political trust. And following from this impact, in combination with the well-recognised value of political trust by social scientists as well as a host of other principled reasons, I make the claim that political trust can, and should, lie at the very centre of social rights enforcement by courts.

What type of political association is the European Union? From the start of the European integration process, this question has puzzled scholars. Many different answers have been offered, but in the absence of an agreed response, most scholars implicitly avoid the issue by suggesting that the European Union is ‘sui generis’. In contrast, this thesis maintains that the European Union is a federation (Bund): a political union of states founded on a federal treaty-constitution that does not constitute a new federal state. The thesis maintains, further, that the federation is a discrete form of political association on a par with, though differentiated from, the empire and the state. The thesis aims to make three contributions. First, to contribute to the constitutional theory of the European Union by solving the mystery of its political form. Second, to contribute to the constitutional theory of the federation through an in-depth case study of the European Union as a federal union of states. Third, to contribute to both European Union studies and federalism studies by showing, first, how some of the most profound constitutional questions of the contemporary European Union raised by the rise of authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary and the Eurozone crisis can be properly understood on the basis of the constitutional theory of the federation. Second, by demonstrating how these contemporary issues shed light on the most difficult question for the constitutional theory of the federation: whether, to what extent and under what circumstances the Union has authority to intervene in the internal constitutional affairs of its Member States.

This socio-legal study reconceptualizes the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law (IHL). Moving away from the dominant vision of fixed civilian and combatant entities separated by a bright line, it introduces an alternative vision of how distinction works in different places and at different times, or what we might think of as ‘a new law of distinction’. This account is grounded in the practices of international actors across a number of global sites: from Geneva and The Hague to civil–military training programmes in Europe and the operational context of South Sudan. The main character of interest is the international humanitarian actor, who is situated alongside other international actors, such as NATO soldiers, UN peacekeepers and UN civilian actors. As is shown, the everyday interactions of these actors are shaped by contests over distinction. In the law of distinction that is distilled from these practices, qualities of ‘civilianness’ and ‘combatantness’ float around in the air, able to attach to any individual at any given moment, depending upon their self-presentation, behaviour and context. Three new figures emerge around these qualities: the ‘civilian plus’, the ‘mere civilian’ and the ‘civilian minus’. The ‘civilian plus’, this study proposes, represents a special status that international humanitarian actors disseminate on a daily basis. This special status relies upon a concept of civilianness that is relative, contingent and aligned with an alreadyfragmented civilian category in IHL. The distinction practices of humanitarian actors also have an important performance component, designed to influence the perceptions of an omnipresent observer – the ‘phantom local’. The overarching aim of this inquiry is to uncover and contend with distinction’s perpetually disrupted nature. The study dismantles the idea of distinction as we know it, enabling us to recognize distinction in strange and unfamiliar forms.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of the problems of fraud and the abuse of the corporate form under UK and Nigerian company laws. The twin doctrines of separate legal personality and limited liability for members shield shareholders and directors from personal liability for the debts of the company with far reaching implications for creditors and wider society. Although this position is not immutable as demonstrated in Salomon v Salomon, an analysis of case law and statute within the general rubric of ‘lifting the veil’ or ‘piercing the veil’ in the two jurisdictions reveals that veil piercing approaches have for several reasons remained fundamentally flawed. There is no coherent principle upon which the courts may find exceptional circumstances to impose liability on shareholders and directors. Veil piercing approaches have been premised on loss allocation analysis and used only as a means to discard limited liability. No effort has been made to deny controlling shareholders and directors the benefits derived from fraud, an omission that is detrimental to the interest of creditors and thus demonstrates the need for a new approach. This thesis therefore argues that gains made by fraudulent shareholders or directors constitute an unjustified enrichment which must be disgorged for distribution to creditors. To this end, the thesis proposes a ‘responsible corporate personality model’ which gives the creditors wider rights of action to initiate claims against corporate controllers to deny or prevent wrongful benefits or proceeds of unjust enrichment when the company is insolvent or approaching insolvency. The model addresses questions such as the role of constructive trust in combating fraud, tracing, fraudulent transfer of company’s assets to third parties and obstacles imposed by the requirement of fiduciary relationship. It supports the approach to unjust enrichment, suggesting lessons for both the UK and Nigeria in order to preserve equity and prevent improper conduct of corporate controllers. A key argument is that the responsible corporate model can address certain socio-economic peculiarities of Nigeria and similar developing countries.

The principal objective of this thesis is to examine the scope of investment treaty protection against the host state’s interference with foreign investment, and to identify the frontiers of state responsibility under international investment agreements in light of the decline of expropriation and the rise of non-expropriatory standards of treatment, including the standard of national treatment, fair and equitable treatment and umbrella clauses. In making a foray into the stormy relationship between the protection of foreign investment and the host state’s freedom to intervene in the marketplace in the exercise of its regulatory functions, this study is embedded in the wider context of the ongoing debate about the design of the mechanism of investment protection as well as its function in practice. It is argued that the expropriation standard does not provide an adequate framework for determining investor claims against host states. The thesis puts forward a proposal to abandon expropriation and to adopt a unified standard of treatment based on the guarantees of non-discrimination, non-arbitrariness and due process of law.

The primary aim of this thesis is to identify a coherent legal response to the particular causal problem of the ‘evidentiary gap’. In order to do this, it is necessary to understand how the ‘evidentiary gap’ relates to causation in negligence more generally, so the thesis addresses both the nature and function of the tort of negligence as well as the role played by causation within that tort. It argues that negligence is best understood as a system of corrective justice-based interpersonal responsibility. In this account, causation has a vital role so the test of causation must be philosophically sound. Causation, however, also occupies only a limited role so analysis must draw fully on the doctrines of damage and breach which bracket the causation inquiry, as well as notions of quantification of loss. The NESS test for causation is shown to be preferable to the but-for test because it is conceptually more adequate and therefore able to address causal problems that the but-for test cannot. This thesis rejects claims for proportionate recovery based on the notion of loss of a chance of avoiding physical harm in medical negligence, but proposes limited recovery for loss of a chance as an independent form of damage arising because of unique considerations of interpersonal responsibility in the doctor-patient relationship in cases of misdiagnosis/ mistreatment of existing illness. It is argued that the Fairchild test of material contribution to risk of harm in cases of evidentiary gap is not consistent with corrective justice, and that this cannot be resolved by reconceptualising the gist of the action as the risk of harm. The Fairchild exception lacks coherence because of its instrumentalist basis, so should not be applied outside of the mesothelioma context.

The thesis analyses the use and need for involvement of external participants in the EU decision making process through the relevant instruments. The analysis begins with the Treaty of Lisbon and the observation that the principle of participation was not been retained in the text of the Treaty. At present, participation is mainly implemented by the White Paper on EU Governance; the White Paper is considered to be the starting point for the involvement of external participants as well as the use of scientific and technical knowledge in EU decision-making process. The analysis continues with the review of a myriad of communications, policies, and initiatives in this domain: for instance, the Guidelines on collection and use of expertise and the Science and society action plan are discussed in details. Better involvement has to be supported by appropriate communication and consultation policies as well as access to information and justice, the latter being implemented by the Århus Convention. This convention, which has been partially transcribed into EU law, enacts a requirement to form a qualified entity in order to be eligible to represent a public interest in the environmental field. Finally, comitology committees are recognized to be one of the legal tools to involve external participants in the EU decision-making process. Still, the scientific know-how as well as the provided expertise is non-binding; independent participation is not yet established in the EU decision-making process.