Preface

This project started early and finished late. My interest in ‘enforcement rights’ was first piqued in 2017 by my former PhD student, Laura Guttoso, whose tragic death cut short what would surely have been a glowing career. Laura was interested in public and private enforcement techniques in competition law—not a field with which I was at all well acquainted at the time. The germ of interest she planted in me grew into a short contribution to the University of Queensland Law Review in 2018, published posthumously alongside a number of other articles celebrating her life and work. There I first set out the bare bones of the larger project contained in this book. The ambition in both cases has been to set about a clearer modelling of the way in which ‘enforcement rights’ are distributed between the State and private actors across the broad landscape of both public and private law. This has proven to be a highly ambitious task and it has taken me well outside my normal wheelhouse. Part of what drove the project from the start was the sense that my own assumptions concerning who it is that has the right to ‘prosecute’ our laws (in the broadest sense of the word) were seriously deficient. What appeared to me to be the paradigmatic way of thinking about public and private law as more or less airtight domains of public and private interest was wrong; as, clearly, was the associated assumption that it is the State that always exercises rights of action in public law and private parties that always exercise them in private law. The exceptions to the basic rules in each case were initially a source of hesitation and interest, then an irritant, and finally became an obsession calling for detailed explanation and justification.