Janet McLean explores how the common law has personified the state and how those personifications affect and reflect the state's relationship to bureaucracy, sovereignty and civil society, the development of public law norms, the expansion and contraction of the public sphere with nationalization and privatization, state responsibility and human rights. Treating legal thought as a variety of political thought, she discusses writers such as Austin, Maitland, Dicey, Laski, Robson, Hart, Griffith, Mitchell and Hayek in the context of both legal doctrine and broader intellectual movements.

In this set of essays,public lawyers, property lawyers and legal philosophers examine the public dimensions of private property. At a time when governments across the globe are privatising formerly public property, the public forum is being replaced by the privately owned shopping mall, and an increasing range of interests are being described as 'property', an examination of the powers which attach to ownership becomes all the more pressing. The contributors consider whether property is a human right, its role in making responsible citizens, its relationship to freedom of speech and other values, the proper scope of constitutional protections of private property, impediments to the redistribution of property, and attempts to redress historical wrongs by property settlements to indigenous people. Taking a richly comparative perspective, examples have been drawn from jurisdictions as diverse as the United Kingdom, South Africa, Germany, the United States, and New Zealand. Contributors: Janet McLean (ed), Kevin Gray, Susan Francis Gray, Geoffrey Samuel, J W Harris, Gregory Alexander, Andre van der Walt, Tom Allen, Jeremy Waldron, Maurice Goldsmith, Alex Frame, John Dawson, Michael Robertson.

In 1864 a gallery housing just 112 paintings, many on loan from the National Gallery, London, opened to the public in Dublin. The space was called the National Gallery of Ireland. Today the museum houses the Irish national collection of Irish and European art, notable not only for its extensive collection of Irish art but also for its Italian baroque and Dutch masters paintings. For this anthology, published to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland, fifty-six Irish writers have contributed a short story, essay, or poem inspired by a work in the collection. The interactions with the paintings are by turns profound, playful, and insightful. The authors include the cream of contemporary Irish literature, such as Colm Toibin, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, and the late Seamus Heaney. The paintings they have selected are as diverse as the reasons that prompted the choice and range from works by old masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, El Greco, and Velazquez to pictures by more modern artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, and Gabrielle Munter, as well as those by Irish artists such as Jack B. Yeats, John Lavery, Gerard Dillon, and Paul Henry. The book is organized alphabetically by writer and each text is illustrated with the chosen work in color. Sean Rainbird, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, has contributed the foreword."

Janet McLean explores how the common law has personified the state and how those personifications affect and reflect the state's relationship to bureaucracy, sovereignty and civil society, the development of public law norms, the expansion and contraction of the public sphere with nationalization and privatization, state responsibility and human rights. Treating legal thought as a variety of political thought, she discusses writers such as Austin, Maitland, Dicey, Laski, Robson, Hart, Griffith, Mitchell and Hayek in the context of both legal doctrine and broader intellectual movements.