Archives

  • Concession contracts
    Vol. 12 No. 1 (2025)

    The history of concessions for public works and services in Portugal has been marked by enormous successes in the country's infrastructure development, as well as experiences that have been severely criticised by various political and judicial quarters (in particular by the Court of Auditors) for their financial sustainability and economic rationality. It has often been pointed out that the way in which various concessions and public-private partnerships were structured, poorly prepared, with a deficient allocation of risks to the private partner, and based on often unrealistic demand projections, called into question the budgetary affordability of the projects, placed an unsustainable burden on the public treasury, undermined the ‘principle of intergenerational equity’, and offered private partners advantages that were disproportionate to the investments and risks assumed.

  • Access to justice and enforcement of rights – an introduction
    Vol. 12 No. 2 (2025)

    Imagine walking into a courtroom for the first time in your life. You feel stressed, uncertain, and everything is at stake. Now imagine that on the other side sits an insurance company or government agency that has been in this position hundreds of times before. This contrast – between what Marc Galanter (1974) called the “one-shotter” and the “repeat player” – lies at the heart of his classic work Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead. Galanter showed that courts do not operate on a level playing field: those who appear again and again develop strategies, cultivate expertise, and even shape the rules themselves, while individuals, appearing only once, must bear the full risk of an unfamiliar system. The result is not random but structural: repeat players steadily accumulate advantages, while one-shotters are left at a disadvantage. More than forty years after its publication, Galanter’s argument continues to resonate: inequality before the courts is not simply about who has the better lawyer, but about how institutions themselves reward those who already know how to play the game.

  • Dubious problems in international law: legal theory meets international law
    Vol. 12 No. 3 (2025)

    For decades, international law focused primarily on relations between international actors, mainly states but also, to some extent, state-like entities or organizations. Legal theory, operating within this narrow view of international law, emphasized general questions concerning the validity of international legal norms and the sources from which they derive their binding force. Voluntarist approaches to international law, once highly influential, posited that the source of international legal norms lay in the “self-limitation” of states. Whereas Georg Jellinek (1880: 48–49) viewed this Selbstbeschränkung as an expression of sovereign will, John Austin (1995: 171) insisted that it resulted in international law not being truly “law.” According to Austin, there is no supreme sovereign among international actors capable of issuing sanction-backed commands. Norms contained in international treaties are therefore “laws improperly so called” (Austin, 1995: 123), stemming from voluntary agreements accepted by the parties solely on the basis of moral principles and custom

  • Artificial Intelligence, Legal Theory and the Judiciary
    Vol. 11 No. 1 (2024)

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role at the intersection of modernday legal theory and legal practice. On the one hand, it encompasses automated reasoning, Natural Language Process (NLP) models, and computational legal theory, influencing and helping various aspects of legal operations. On the other, it also optimizes the judiciary with efficient, transparent, and rights-preserving procedures. Thus, AI is both seen as a research topic, a bureaucratic advantage, and a constitutional threat, which shows its significance in the legal landscape.

  • Post 9/11 Jus Belli
    Vol. 11 No. 2 (2024)

    The new, and in many ways revolutionary, paradigm which came out of World War II, translated in the Charter of the United Nations, through the general principle of the prohibition of the use of force (Article 2(4)), was swiftly submitted to a reality check. Since then, the prohibition of the use of force and its exceptions, in particular, self-defence and Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII of the Charter, have faced constant challenges and doubts fuelled, in part, by geopolitical interests and inherent fragilities.

  • Digital Regulation
    Vol. 11 No. 3 (2024)

    In the European Union, policymakers have been trying to meet the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, culminating in a range of regulatory instruments and authorities that pose serious challenges to both legal theory and legal practice. From the recent EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), both courts and regulators (administrative authorities and digital platforms) have yet to assess how the intersection of these instruments will work in practice across different sectors, legal systems and technological contexts. As this issue of e-Publica shows, the task of balancing innovation with the protection of fundamental rights and digital innovation is certainly not an easy one.

  • International and European Law in the Wake of the Invasion of Ukraine – One Year On
    Vol. 10 No. 1 (2023)

  • Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Constitutional Court
    Vol. 10 No. 2 (2023)

    e-Publica could not fail to join in the celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the Constitutional Court, which is being commemorated throughout 2023. The existence of a constitutional court with the characteristics of the Constitutional Court is, perhaps, the main innovation of the constitutional order re-established by the 1976 Constitution, and the effective implementation of a consistent practice of respect for and compliance with fundamental rights by public authorities depends, to a large extent, on it.