This chapter shows how the police power is justified and limited when it is structured consistent with natural rights. The power to regulate is the power to “make rights regular,” that is, to establish positive law rules that give citizens in practice freedom corresponding fairly to the freedom to which they’re entitled by natural law. Regulations can rely on any of three basic models. Some regulations make rights determinate. Some regulations prevent harm; they institute in public law prohibitions against violating rights, and they supply remedies for violations of the prohibitions. Some regulations secure average reciprocities of advantage. Those regulations reorder positive law rights when doing so seems likely in practice to serve rights-holders’ interests in using their possessions better than existing rights would. Laws that satisfy none of these three models may still be just laws – but they do not constitute just regulations and they need to be justified consistent with some other model of government action. This chapter responds to skeptical critiques of the police power influential in modern US Supreme Court case law and scholarship.

Dublin: A Writer’s City begins with a personal introduction, in which the author reflects on his arrival in the city in the mid-1980s, and his realization during his very first hours there that he was living a few doors down from where Oscar Wilde had been born, on a street that features in Ulysses, in the stories of Samuel Beckett, and in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella – and around the corner from the site of the first production of what would become the Abbey Theatre. This initial stroll down an apparently innocuous street – Westland Row – provides the basis for a reflection on the ways in which being aware of the literature of a city influence our experience of urban living. These reflections are framed in the context of the empty city during the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020.