This dissertation deals with court-executive relations in post-authoritarian Argentina (1983-2006). Specifically, I analyse Supreme Court behaviour in highly sensitive cases to determine whether the tribunal has cooperated with or obstructed the government’s policy preferences in three key policy areas: human rights, economic emergency and pensions. This innovative type of approach – i.e., focusing on a small number of highly sensitive decisions – allows me to concentrate on cases that are genuinely important for the government or, more precisely, for the country’s political administration. There are cases that are significant for the State apparatus but irrelevant for the president (thinking of politicians as self-interested actors). My research uses a rational choice approach to courts, underscoring the strategic nature of judicial behaviour. This vision of judges provides a more accurate account of judicial-executive relations by bringing politics into the study of courts. By focusing exclusively on attitudes and apolitical jurisprudence, other visions take for granted the institutional context. Political stability, for example, cannot be assumed in many developing democracies. My findings indicate that the Argentine Supreme Court has consistently avoided obstructing the president’s policy preferences. Such behaviour is motivated by strategic considerations: judges are risk-averse actors that avoid clashing with the executive. For most of the time, the Supreme Court has operated under unified government, which increases the chances of being punished for anti-government decisions. Two other factors also account for the court’s risk-averse behaviour. First, procedural rules grant the Supreme Court wide discretion over its docket. The tribunal has used such discretion to strategically select the timing of its decisions. Second, recurrent democratic breakdowns have repeatedly led to attacks against the court, such as impeachment, irregular dismissals, and/or enlargements. Third, politicians exert broad control of judicial promotions, allowing them to block the careers of independent, courageous judges that act as a check on political power.

The thesis constitutes a detailed historical reconstruction of the creation, contestation and subsequent amendment of the Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence, the principal ‘dangerous offender’ measure of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Underpinned by an interpretive political analysis of penal politics, the thesis draws on a detailed analysis of relevant documents and 53 interviews with national level, policy-oriented actors. The thesis explores how actors’ conceptions of ‘risk’ and ‘the public’ interwove with the political beliefs and political traditions relied upon by the relevant actors. It is argued that while there was general recognition of a ‘real problem’ existing in relation to dangerous offenders, the central actors in the creation of the IPP sentence crucially lacked a detailed understanding of the state of the art of risk assessment and management (Kemshall, 2003) and failed to appreciate the systemic risks posed by the IPP sentence. The creation of the IPP sentence, as with its subsequent amendment, is argued to highlight the extreme vulnerability felt by many government actors. The efforts of interest groups and other pressure participants to have their concerns addressed regarding the systemic and human damage subsequently caused by the under-resourcing of the IPP sentence is explored, and the challenge of stridently arguing for substantial change while maintaining ‘insider’ status is discussed. As regards senior courts’ efforts to rein in the IPP sentence, it is argued that the increasingly conservative nature of the judgments demonstrate that the judiciary are not immune from the creep of a ‘precautionary logic’ into British penal politics. Regarding the amendment of the IPP sentence, the Ministry of Justice’s navigation between the twin dangers of a systemic crisis and a political crisis are explored. In conclusion, the IPP story is argued to demonstrate a troubling ‘thoughtlessness’ by many of the key policymakers, revealing what is termed the ‘banality of punitiveness.’ The potential for a reliance on political beliefs and traditions to slip into this thoughtless state, and possible ways of ensuring that such policy issues are engaged with in a more inclusive and expansive manner, are discussed.

This thesis is an institutional ethnography of the Nigeria Police Force. It concentrates on evidence from 18 months of fieldwork in one particular police station, in the pseudonymised town of Dutsin Bature in central Nigeria, and draws comparative evidence from examples and locations elsewhere in Nigeria. The fieldwork evidence is also supported by analyses of public discourse, literature reviews, some formal interviews and historical research. The thesis aims to fill a gap in empirical scholarship by looking at policing in Nigeria primarily from the level of everyday practice, and deriving understandings of the ways the overall system works, rather than by taking normative structural approaches and basing suppositions of actual behaviour upon these. It also aims to document emic perspectives on policing in Nigeria, in contrast to most existing scholarship and public discourse which takes an external perspective, from which the voices and worldviews of police themselves are absent. The thesis situates this ethnography within three theoretical terrains. First, developing understandings of policing and public security in Africa, which have often neglected in-depth studies of formal police forces. Secondly, enlarging the ethnographic study of formal institutions in African states, to develop a closer understanding of what state systems are and how they function, beyond the overtly dysfunctionalist perspectives which have dominated recent scholarship. Thirdly, informing ongoing debates over state and society in Africa, problematising understandings which see these as separate entities instead of mutually constitutive, and drawing attention to the ways in which the two interpenetrate and together mould the public sphere. The thesis begins with a historical overview of the trajectory of formal policing in Nigeria, then examines public understandings and representations of policing, before moving inside the institutional boundaries, considering in turn the human composition of the police, training and character formation, the way police officers do their work in Dutsin Bature, Nigerian police officers’ preoccupation with risk and the systemic effects of their efforts to mitigate it, and finally officers’ subjective perspectives on their work, their lived realities, and on Nigeria in an era of transition. These build together to suggest some conclusions pertinent to the theoretical perspectives.

This dissertation assesses how Islamic finance fares as an example of 'civil compromise' in Islamic law. By focusing on the Islamic project finance sector, my research examines how the industry's main stakeholders (representing faith, capital, and power) cooperate and compete to bring about this compromise through the 'Game of Islamic Bank Bargains'. The Islamic finance industry is a work in progress, and while it has made some significant strides, it is still a niche in the global conventional financial order rather than an alternative to it. It has fallen short of fulfilling its originally-stated social justice aspirations, but has provided a previously unavailable form of banking and finance for Muslims to transact, at least formalistically, in accordance with widely-believed tenets of their faith. Thus, those who hold up Islamic finance as a universal panacea or dismiss it outright as a fraud have both got it wrong. It is neither. It is, rather, a complex myriad of incentives and aspirations of a multitude of stakeholders muddled together across numerous geographies and evolving incrementally and constantly. The state of the industry is the result of how the stakeholders (the shariah scholars, lawyers, bankers, government officials, and customers) have pursued their self-interest in the Game of Islamic Bank Bargains. My research examines who are the 'winners' and 'losers' of this game, and what religious, commercial, and political factors have influenced this outcome. I assess what may incentivise the incumbent 'winners' to guide the Islamic finance industry away from a formal and legalistic approach towards one that also incorporates principles from Islamic economics. I explore how the 'losers' - whose interests are not accounted for due to their lack of sufficient financial and political clout - can sway the outcome of the game in their favour.

The regulation of hedge funds has been at the centre of a global policy debate for much of the past decade. Several factors feature in this debate including the magnitude of current global investments in hedge funds and the potential of hedge funds to both generate wealth and destabilise financial markets. The first part of the thesis describes the nature of hedge funds and locates the work in relation to four elements in existing theory including regulatory competition theory, the concept of differential mobility as identified by Musgrave, Kane’s concept of the regulatory dialectic between regulators and regulatees, and the concept of unique sets of trust and confidence factors that individual jurisdictions convey to the market. It also identifies a series of questions that de-limit the scope of the present work. These include whether there is evidence that regulatory competition occurs in the context of the provision of domicile for hedge funds, what are the factors which account for the current global distribution of hedge fund domicile, what latitude for regulatory competition is available to jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds, how is such latitude shaped by factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the competing jurisdictions, and why do the more powerful onshore jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds not shut down their smaller and weaker competitors? The second part of the thesis examines the regulatory environment for hedge funds in three so-called offshore jurisdictions, specifically the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, as well as two onshore jurisdictions, specifically the United Kingdom and the United States. The final section presents a series of conclusions and their implications for both regulatory competition theory and policy.

Although social policy was once perceived to be solely within the purview of the nation state, there has been a move toward a more European social policy. The European Court of Justice for the European Communities (‘Court of Justice’ or ‘Court’) determines the scope of European law and how it affects national welfare states. The court’s decisions will affect not only the national law of the member states with regard to social policy but also the direction of European social policy as it expands. However, the ECJ does not choose the policy areas in which it makes its decisions, but instead reacts to the preliminary references that are sent by the national courts of the Member States. These preliminary references from the Member States will set the Court’s agenda. Preliminary references are unevenly distributed across the Member States of the EU, and some Member States’ preliminary references are concentrated in particular policy areas. The jurisprudence of the Court, and consequently the social policy of the EU, could be steered by this uneven distribution. This thesis will answer the threshold question of why scholars of social policy should care about the Court of Justice, with a legal analysis of some key themes in the Court’s decisions in the area of social policy. It will then employ a mixed methods research design to explain the variation in rates of social policy preliminary references from the EU-15. First, a Time Series Cross-Section (TSCS) model will be used to test a series of hypotheses generated from the literature, and three novel hypotheses, in a dataset of social policy preliminary references from the EU-15 from 1996 to 2009. Next, a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin 2000) will group the variables that were found to be significant into sets of conditions, or ‘causal pathways,’ that lead to higher and lower rates of social policy preliminary references. Finally, two qualitative case studies will be conducted, in the UK and France. Analysis of documentary evidence and 25 expert interviews in the two member states and at the Court of Justice will further explain and illuminate the differing usage of preliminary reference process. The analysis of the mixed methods is integrated in the final stage. Implications for the direction of EU law related to social policy and the future development of European social policy will be considered in the concluding chapter.

This thesis brings together two responses to the question ‘how can the law extend the timeframe for environmentally relevant decision-making?’ The first response is drawn from the context of institutional investment, and addresses the timeframe and breadth of environmental considerations in pension fund investment decision-making. The second response is related to the context of public environmental decision-making by legislators, the judiciary, and administrators. Three themes underlie and bind the thesis: the challenges to decision-making posed by the particular temporal and spatial characteristics of environmental problems, the existence and effects of short-termism in a variety of contexts, and the legal notion of the trust as a means for analysing and addressing problems of a long-term or intergenerational nature. These themes are borne out in each of the four substantive chapters. Chapter III sets out to demonstrate the theoretical potential of pension funds to drive the reduction of firms’ environmental impact, and, focusing particularly on the notion of fiduciary duty, explores the barriers that stand in their way. Chapter IV provides a practical application of the theoretical recommendations outlined in its predecessor. It provides a framework outlining how pension funds might implement a longer term, more sustainable approach to investing. The second half of the thesis, operating in the context of public environmental decision-making, is centred upon a particularly poignant legal notion with respect to the environment and time: the concept of intergenerational equity. Just as the first half of the thesis deals with the timeframes relevant to investment decision-making by pension funds within the bounds of fiduciary duty, largely a private law affair with public implications, the second half of the thesis is concerned with the principle of intergenerational equity as a means for extending the decision-making timeframe of legislative, judicial and administrative decision-makers. As previous analyses of the concept of intergenerational equity provide little insight into its practical implications when applied to particular factual situation, Chapter V sets out the structure of the principle of intergenerational equity as revealed by case law. Chapter VI brings together the issues from the first three papers by conceptualising intergenerational equity in resource management as an issue of long-term investment. Long-term environmental decision-making faces many obstacles. Individual behavioural biases, short-term financial incentive structures, the myopic pressures of the electoral cycle and the tendency of the common law to reinforce the (often shorttermist) status quo all present significant barriers to the capacity of both private and public decision-makers to act in ways that favour the longer term interests of the environment. Nonetheless, this thesis argues that there is reason for hope: drawing upon the three themes that underlie all of the substantive Chapters, it articulates potential legislative changes and recommends the adoption of particular governance structures to overcome barriers to long-term environmental decision-making.

A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.