This collection of essays explores themes and controversies (legal, political
and scholarly) in public law which are subjects of current debate in that
area, while also (we hope) contributing to those debates from both practical
and theoretical perspectives. The purposes of this Introduction are to set the
scene by outlining the political context in which public law and its scholarship
have developed over the past forty or so years, and to locate within
that context and in relation to each other some of the themes which our
contributors develop in the chapters which follow.