Public-Private Drift and the Shattering Polity

American Journal of Jurisprudence (Forthcoming)

St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-0007

23 Pages Posted: 10 Jan 2023 Last revised: 13 Jul 2023

See all articles by Marc O. De Girolami

Marc O. De Girolami

Catholic University of America (CUA) - Columbus School of Law

Date Written: January 9, 2023

Abstract

The public law/private law divide is back. Scholars with a broad range of theoretical commitments are attempting to rediscover or reestablish the division. This paper approaches the public-private law problem by describing what it calls “drift.” Drift is the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be private law to become public (public drift), and the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be public law to become private (private drift). Though it is possible to distinguish public and private drift conceptually, drift is in practice a unified phenomenon: public and private drift go together. Drift is manifested not only in formal, legal developments, but also in the informal processes by which public law frameworks now influence private ordering, private rulemaking, and private relationships, as well as the way private authorities have been entrusted with the responsibility to implement those public law frameworks.

This paper’s perspective on the public-private debate is explanatory. It accepts that many people perceive or believe American law to be in some sense divided into public and private domains, without endorsing that perception or belief. It does so in order better to describe the coming of drift. Even if one were skeptical about the conceptual purity of public and private law, one might nevertheless believe that what is public and private is a question of more and less, of greater and lesser degrees, and that there can be periods of relative stability in these categories and relative disruption. The paper describes various contemporary examples of drift, explains drift’s comparative ascendancy today, and speculates about possible future developments for drift.

The upshot is that drift in public and private law may not be driven primarily by anything innate or conceptually necessary in the disciplines believed to constitute private or public law. Drift is instead a political byproduct, the issue of social and cultural anxieties concerning the absence of anything like a common political project, anxieties that drive powerful actors toward manufacturing imaginary commonalities that they press with confounding certitude. The powerful exploit and manipulate areas of law that properly pertain to the public and private domains, repurposing them for new uses, because their regular use is ineffective in achieving their political objectives. The paper deliberately selects examples of drift that exhibit what would be conventionally described as conservative and progressive valences (in the meteoric rise of public nuisance, in the strategy of statutes like Texas’ S.B. 8, in the mixed public-private response to COVID-19, in the controversies about social media speech control, and others) to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. Drift is a response to a perceived political void or emptiness in which public-private partnerships of powerful actors emerge to fill the void, capture the institutions of power, and coerce people’s behavior into certain ideological grooves. Drift is, in sum, a reaction to social fragmentation that ironically and unhappily exacerbates the pathologies that provoke it in the first place.

Suggested Citation

De Girolami, Marc O., Public-Private Drift and the Shattering Polity (January 9, 2023). American Journal of Jurisprudence (Forthcoming), St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-0007, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4320742 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4320742

Marc O. De Girolami (Contact Author)

Catholic University of America (CUA) - Columbus School of Law ( email )

3600 John McCormack Rd., NE
Washington, DC 20064
United States

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