What is Public Law?

What is Public Law?

1. How does it differ from Private Law

   • Public law is the study of law that regulates the relationship between the individual and the state, and organisation and the state
   • There are different views on what public law means
   • Public law is linked to politics, history and other disciplines such as economics and sociology, and cannot be studied as merely referring to the text of law
   • There are competing theories with no one right answer, but there may be a number of wrong ones

2. Constitutional and administrative distinction

   • Constitutional law is the study of law that founds the state and sets up its institutions. It also regulates the relationship between the organs of the states
   • Administrative law is the law that provides the power and imposes the duties on government departments and public bodies, so that they may fulfil the tasks that have been designated to them by the state
   • Constitutional and administrative law are inherently political, because they are based on different notions of how states should run and for what purpose

3. Public law relevance

   • Pervades many aspects of everyday lives, from health and education, to immigration and the environment
   • Different understandings of consitutional and administrative law linked to different political ideologies about the purpose of the stationed the relationship between the individual and the state
   • The different theories are evidenced by changes in public administration and changes in the way in which public services are delivered
   • Recent governmental reforms have made changes to the structure of the state, which in turn have had an impact on public law
   • The red-light, green-light and amber-light labels are useful ways of categorising some of these differences to help understand the interplay between law and politics, the individual and state, the law and policy

4. Key principles of public law

   • Rule of law means that the state is founded on the assumption that the law will be respected and that any individual or official may be brought before the court if there is evidence that he or she has broken the law
   • Separation of powers means that the organs of the state are sufficiently separate so the power of the state is not abused to determine the citizens
   • Representative democracy indicates that parliamentarians have the power to make the law and to scrutinise the working of government, because the electorate has elected MPs to perform the functions on our behalf.
   • Parliamentary legislative supremacy means that parliament has the supreme power to make, amend and repeal laws on our behalf
   • Limited and responsible government means that the executive must obey the lae and may be judicially reviewed and held to account by the courts if it is believe that the executive had acted illegally, irrationally and procedurally improperly, has broken the rules of natural justice or has breached the Human Rights Act 1998