Prof Thomas Poole

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course is available with permission to General Course students.

Outline:

The course provides an opportunity to take a deep dive into the modern state. We investigate how the state organises and exercises power, and how such power is legitimated and controlled. At all times we remain alert to the pathologies of state power - corruption, mismanagement, capture by elites - and what might be done to prevent them. Classic themes surrounding law and state power - such as tensions between technocracy and democracy, bureaucratic rationality and charismatic authority, agency autonomy and political accountability - are given contemporary resonance by studying topical themes of importance, such as populism and illiberal democracy, citizenship deprivation and the politics of pandemic management.

Syllabus:

Theories of power. The nature of the modern state. Law and government. Power and prerogative. Soft law: the role of policies and guidance in governance structures. Technocracy and democracy. Corruption and administration. The ‘contracting state’. Risk and the regulatory state. Crisis management including COVID-19 case study. The legal control of state power. Biopolitics - citizenship deprivation and the Illegal Migration Bill.

This course will have a minimum of two hours of teaching content each week in Autumn Term and Winter Term, in the form of a two hour seminar. This course includes a reading week in Weeks 6 of Autumn Term and Winter Term.

At least one formative essay per term.

Martin Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law (Oxford, 2004)

Carol Harlow and Richard Rawlings, Law and Administration (Cambridge, 4th ed., 2021)

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.