ABSTRACT
Classically, private law is regarded as being concerned with private interests of citizens and organisations. The public interest, if cast in legal form, is to be found in public law, as the product of a political process. Although issues of public interest have never been entirely absent from private law, the changes in the role of the state usually associated with privatisation create the conditions for a renewed role for public interest ideas in private law. For example, the privatisation of many public services in areas such as health and education has resulted in the provision by contract of services with a variety of public dimensions. The expansion of environmental law, at the same time as a loss of confidence in command and control regulation, raises questions about the role of property and other private law rights as a means of protection. And one response to the abandonment of confidence in economic planning, which has accompanied the globalisation of capitalism, has been the emergence of the idea of stakeholding – as a means of using institutional structures to reimpose on organisations the need to take account of the wider impact of their activities that was formerly transmitted via regulation.
