Professor David Feldman
Subject
College Position
Emeritus Fellow in Law
University Position
Rouse Ball Professor of English Law
Degrees and Honours

QC (Hon), MA, DCL (Oxon), LLD (Hon, Bristol), FBA, FRSA

Research Interests

My research interests cover a wide range of public law fields, using historical (including archival) alongside legal methods.  I have recently been looking at the practical implications and theoretical foundations of the idea of invalidity of administrative acts in administrative law, the nature of the distinction between public and private law, what it means to legislate, and the interplay of politics and law in ground-breaking legal developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.  

Current projects include an attempt to encapsulate the essence of the notion of constitutional law and its relationship to constitutional politics and different types of power, and (in the longer term) developing an historically informed understanding of the reasons for, and methods by which, state-like structures arise and are maintained or fail.

Select Publications

“Statutory interpretation and constitutional legislation” (2014) 130 Law Quarterly Review 473-497.  ISSN 0023-933X

“Error of law and flawed administrative acts” [2014] Cambridge Law Journal (volume 73, part 2) 275-314. 

“Legislation which bears no law” (2016) 37(3) Statute Law Review 212-224.

“The Politics and People of Entick v. Carrington”, in Adam Tomkins and Paul Scott (eds), Entick v. Carrington: 250 Years of the Rule of Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2015), ch. 1, pp. 5-41.

“The Distinctiveness of Public Law”, in Mark Elliott and David Feldman (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Public Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).