Date: Wednesday 18 October 2023

Time: 10.30am - 6pm

Location: Bartolome House (Moot Court), School of Law, Winter Street, Sheffield S3 7ND

This workshop will bring together emerging and established scholars to debate and discuss justifications for regulatory intervention. In doing so, the workshop aims to revitalise an important theme in socio-legal scholarship and establish an agenda to ensure the continuing advance of this research.

- Professor Julia Black, London School of Economics

- Professor Tony Prosser, University of Bristol

- Dr Adam White, University of Sheffield

- Dr Richard Craven, University of Sheffield

For better or for worse, in a range of policy areas — from business and finance to the environment, as well as public services and health — justifications for regulation are framed either in the language of market failure or its counterpart government failure. By contrast, the point of departure of much socio-legal scholarship is the recognition that societal issues cannot be reduced to this dichotomy. In such socio-legal work, we find non-economic explanatory frameworks for regulation are important, based on a broader conception of the common good.

The extent to which this scholarship has fed through into policy development is unclear. Alternative regulatory justifications — grounded in non-economic values (cultural, social, environmental, and so on) — appear still to lack sufficiently robust frameworks. This as an area of regulatory studies that requires further (and continuing) development, and has special relevance given modern regulatory experiences and challenges, including but not limited to: the UK’s “levelling up” policy agenda, Covid-19 lockdowns, digital markets, and the climate emergency.

The one-day WINIR Workshop on Regulation & the Common Good — organized in collaboration with the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), the University of Sheffield’s School of Law, and Reform — will revive and update this important debate in socio-legal studies.

Speakers include

David Barrett (Exeter)
Julia Black (LSE)
Richard Craven (Sheffield)
Andromachi Georgosouli
Sabrina Germain (City)
Arwen Joyce (Leicester)
Tony Prosser (Bristol)
Sharifah Sekalala (Warwick)
Jodi Short (UC Law SF)
Adam White (Sheffield)