Reclaiming the Public

Avihay Dorfman is a law professor at Tel Aviv University. His studies elaborate the non-contingent implications of the law for the possibility of establishing forms of valuable interactions between, and among, persons. Dorfman is the co-author of Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law (2024). Alon Harel holds the Mizock Chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harel has written extensively on political, legal and constitutional theory. In his recent work, he has shown that legal institutions and procedures have intrinsic rather than instrumental value. He is the author of Why Law Matters (2014).

• 1. A Public Conception of Political Authority; 2. Law as Standing; 3. Speaking in a Different Voice: The Necessity of Institutional Pluralism; 4. Inherently Public Goods; 5. Against Privatization As Such; 6. Public Ownership; 7. Why Not Artificial Intelligence? The Normative Status of Public Algorithms; Concluding Remarks.

'Reclaiming the Public develops an account of the distinctively public nature of legal and political institutions: institutions qualify as public only if they speak and act in the name of their constituents. Dorfman and Harel develop this striking idea to provide novel analysis of many of the hardest questions of contemporary political life, including representation, privatization, public ownership, and algorithmic decision making.' Arthur Ripstein, University Professor, University of Toronto