The California Supreme Court’s decision to protect Mono Lake provides a paragon example of how the public trust doctrine can serve as an environmental guardian – as well as a story full of intrigue, suspense, and high stakes. One unusual aspect of the story is that two of the most important characters are neither people nor cities, nor even geological formations on the land – they are laws. In the Mono Lake case, advocates invoked the public trust doctrine to protect public law interests in the environmental values of the waterway, defending them against private law claims to the water within it. To understand how these public and private interests came into conflict at Mono Lake – and why they continue to harbor conflict across all arid lands – it is important to understand the legal doctrines that govern different aspects of water governance. For this reason, the book begins with the law – tracing the history of the public trust doctrine from its ancient Roman and English roots to its reception in the United States, and the conflict posed by independently developing doctrines of private water allocation law, especially the prior appropriations doctrine of the American West.

In November 1972, in the course of talking about public security and protection work, Premier Zhou issued important directives on reactivating and developing informants. Below are his key points (wording not checked by the Premier):

The Premier said the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution resulted in an ideological mobilisation and a mobilisation of the masses. The major weakness in our work now is that we are no longer sufficiently in touch with what is happening in society. The first issue that must be resolved is in the public security sector, where informants must be reactivated and results must be achieved before the end of this year. Our contacts among foreign expatriates, for example, were in some respects quite useful.

The unjust court sentencing and execution of poor peasant Dong Changbao and his son, Dong Renhuo, in Yongkang county in 1958 was yet another heinous crime committed by the handful who held power in the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors and who relied on agents to subject the labouring people to blood-stained oppression. It is also ironclad evidence of the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors enforcing a bourgeois dictatorship.

Transformative constitutions – which have been described as bringing about more than reform but less than a revolution – steer countries towards democracy, participation, and egalitarianism. The interpretation and enforcement of such transformative constitutions by courts and public institutions, such as tax administrations, deliver radical social change. A core aim of a transformative constitution is to promote greater democracy and participation in governance and, thus, state-building. Relying on case studies from Kenya, this chapter asks how citizens contribute to state-building by participating in the national tax policy, administration, and legislative processes and considers the roles of transparency and inclusivity on such public participation.

This chapter discusses possible interpretations for the failure of COVID-19 tracking apps during the pandemic in the Western world in the context of digitalisation. It revisits the impact of digitalisation in public law and examines specific norms governing the right to health. The chapter explores key barriers, including privacy concerns, technological limitations, and public distrust, that contributed to the inefficacy of these digital tools. By analysing these challenges, the study identifies lessons for future digital health policies, emphasising the need for transparent governance, legal safeguards, and public engagement. It argues that human rights law must evolve to better balance privacy with public health objectives, ensuring digital technologies enhance rather than undermine fundamental rights.

Chapter 11 delves into the Rights of Nature, an emerging legal paradigm that ascribes legal rights to natural entities. Drawing on concrete examples from countries such as Ecuador and Colombia, the author elucidates the transformative potential of this paradigm in the realm of climate litigation. One of the most compelling aspects of this approach is the shift it instigates in our legal and ethical relationship with the natural world. By conferring rights upon nature, it challenges the traditional conception of nature as mere property or resource, and it promotes a more holistic relationship with our environment. The author argues that this shift can play a critical role in achieving climate justice by ensuring that the rights and interests of nature itself are protected in the face of climate change. The analysis of emerging best practice reveals that, while still in its early stages, the Rights of Nature approach is starting to gain traction in climate litigation around the world.

Public trust, political will, and the right leadership are all necessary to create and to lift up to the global level a living democracy for a sustainable world. Given the challenges before us, we are running out of time to bring about the necessary disruption in the stalled and stalemated political status quo by significantly expanding direct democratic participation through sortition as the first step toward creating and restoring mutual public trust. Trust must be built by exercising trust. We need trust in governments and between and among governments. Most important, we need trust between and among people who have faith in their fellow men and women to assume the responsibilities of self-rule. Trust can be created by working together in trust. With mutual trust, we can summon the political will to overcome our current inertia and make the changes needed to uplift democracy for a sustainable world. We can find and follow the right leadership. And we can follow the path from the Pnyx to secure at last the global realization of living democracy.

Chapter 5 describes the dramatic changes of situation surrounding paper currency in post-war Britain. It focuses on the forgery crisis of 1818, which significantly undermined public trust in the Bank and its notes. Forgery became an acute problem after 1815, when the risk of becoming a victim (and unintended perpetrator) of the crime was not negligible. As the Bank claimed to be the sole arbiter of Bank notes’ authenticity, note users regarded the Bank’s ability to nullify economic transactions as a grave threat to the security of economic relations and private property. This chapter discusses the public backlash against the Bank as a radicalised version of communal currency. Britain’s note users rejected the idea that the Bank had the exclusive claim to authentic and unauthentic notes as Bank notes, according to the Bank’s critics, belonged to note users and their community. The forgery crisis gave ammunition to anti-paper radicals like Cobbett, while Britain’s note users were losing faith in the system of inconvertible paper, which now rested upon the state’s power to enforce currency circulation – under the Stanhope Act – and the Bank’s judicial violence.

The familiar description of fiduciary law erases European and US imperialism. There is no discussion of the ways in which fiduciary law framed imperial struggles over political and economic power. There is no mention of the roles that fiduciary law played in various European empires and the US Empire between the late fifteenth century, when imperial expansion began, and the time of rapid decolonization in the 1960s. This chapter is a summary of a political economy of fiduciary law and imperialism that I hope to develop at length and in detail. My argument is that the familiar description of the economic structure of fiduciary law is incomplete. So too is the autonomy-enhancing account of fiduciary law. Fiduciary law, I want to argue, may enhance exploitation to facilitate market exchange. It provided an ideological justification for imperial expansion in the interests of opening up trade between peoples. Fiduciary law, moreover, played institutional roles in the financing, administration, and oversight of imperial exploitation and the facilitation of trade among those who benefitted from it.

What would it mean to say that the public trust doctrine is transnational law? This chapter addresses that question. My main conclusion is that the public trust doctrine is a transnational legal norm but not a transnational legal order. To unpack this claim, I apply concepts from Gregory Shaffer and Terence Halliday’s theory of transnational legal orders (TLOs). My claim is that the public trust doctrine is not a transnational legal order in the way that, say, the rule of law is a transnational legal order. In using the public trust doctrine as a case study of the transnational dimensions of public fiduciary law, this chapter aims to introduce an empirically focused socio-legal approach into conversations about public fiduciary theory. Some scholars have made the conceptual claim that public fiduciary law is transnational in scope. In response, this chapter suggests the need for rigorous analysis of normative settlement (or lack thereof) around public fiduciary norms. To the extent that public fiduciary theory aims to reform transnational law, it must confront the challenges of achieving normative settlement in legal practice. The public trust doctrine’s transnational career is a case study in these challenges.

Democratic education is central to the functioning and flourishing of modern multicultural democracies, and yet it is subject to increasing public controversy and political pressure. Waning public trust in government institutions, sustained attacks on democratic values and customs from populist politicians and organizations, political sectarianism, and increasing trends toward privatization and chartering in the educational landscape have placed immense strain on the existing structures of public education and generally worked to undermine public confidence in democratic education. In light of these developments, it seems to us to be of central importance to return to the essential concepts, theories and values of democratic education, both as a social ideal and a political institution. This Handbook aims to offer an expansive view of the formation of individuals for democratic life and includes a diversity of theoretical traditions, topics, and thinkers that are relevant to the theory and practice of democratic education.

This chapter explores the normative foundations of judicial review by rounding back on the concept of office. Judicial review exists to ensure that repositories of official power act only within the scope of the powers reposed in them. Official ‘power’ is inherently limited in virtue of being translated into official ‘powers’ (i.e., vires) that are implicitly capable of judicial interpretation and enforcement. The same applies for the constrains (i.e., rules of conduct) that operate on the manner, form, and purpose of their exercise. This gives rise to a concept of the rule of law as the rule of officials acting lawfully, which is a powerful expression of the ‘rule of law, not of men’ strand of thinking that traces back to Bracton at least. Office provides a superior point of departure than the radical English notion of parliamentary soveriegnty. This makes an appropriate concept of ‘public trust’ or ‘public fiduciary law’ the best expression of the conceptual and normative basis of judicial review. Far from being a slipshod translant of private law fiduciary remedies into public law, the emerging idea of ‘public fiduciary law’ is an apt expression of the deeper logic of office.