School of Law (S.Law) Collections
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
1 - 5 of 277
-
ItemThe sovereign’s mask performed irrationality, coercive bargaining, and the ethics of silence in the theory of sovereign power: a philosophical and jurimetric inquiry into the madman doctrine from Machiavelli to Schelling(Suigeneris Publishers, 2026)The Inverted Premise Classical political theory begins, almost without exception, from the premise that the sovereign’s strength is measured by command of himself before command of others. Aristotle’s account of the statesman, the Stoic ideal of the ruler governed by reason, and the mirror-for-princes literature of the medieval period converge on a single image: the good ruler is the self-possessed ruler. Disorder in the prince’s soul, on this view, precedes and produces disorder in the state. This book is about the doctrine that inverts that premise. It argues—following a line of thought that surfaces explicitly in Niccolò Machiavelli, finds its starkest theoretical statement in Thomas Hobbes, and receives its rigorous modern formulation in Thomas Schelling’s bargaining theory— that under specific structural conditions, the appearance of a ruler’s unreason is not a failure of statecraft but among its most efficient instruments. Call this the madman doctrine: the strategic cultivation of perceived unpredictability as a means of extracting compliance that calm, calculated communication cannot extract at the same price. The madman doctrine is not the claim that irrational rulers sometimes prevail. That claim is trivially true and theoretically uninteresting: chance favours the unpredictable as it favours anyone, some of the time. The doctrine this book examines is narrower and more unsettling — that a rational actor, reasoning correctly about their interests, can conclude that appearing irrational is the optimal strategy, and that audiences are structurally incapable of fully discounting that appearance, because the cost of being wrong about it is asymmetric
-
ItemDigital wealth and algorithmic commerce: the emerging law of artificial intelligence, digital assets, virtual economies, and the future of wealth creation in Africa(Suigeneris Publishers, 2026)Every legal system is, beneath its technical surface, a theory about what is valuable and who is entitled to control it. To understand the law of digital wealth, it is therefore necessary to understand the law of wealth as such — to trace, briefly but seriously, how the object of economic and legal attention has moved across history, and what each shift demanded of the law that governed it.
-
ItemThe garrison state: militarisation of governance in Uganda: law, power, and the future of constitutional democracy(Suigeneris Publishers, 2026)The term “garrison state” enters the literature of political science through Harold D. Lasswell's 1941 essay, written against the immediate background of a world organising itself for total war. Lasswell's concern was not Africa, still substantially under colonial administration at the time, nor was it any particular constitutional order; it was a structural prediction about the direction in which industrialised states under sustained security pressure would tend to move. His thesis was that prolonged preparation for violence produces a distinctive elite—the “specialists on violence” — whose claim to authority rests not on electoral mandate or technical administrative competence but on the management of coercion itself, and that as the salience of external threat grows, this class tends to displace the “specialists on bargaining” who dominate liberal, commercially organised polities.
-
ItemCourts under capture: the political economy of judicial power and constitutional decline in Uganda(Suigeneris Publishers, 2026)Before any institution can be accused of capture, the term itself must be defined with enough precision to be useful. It is tempting, in political commentary, to reach for “captured judiciary” as a rhetorical flourish — a way of expressing dissatisfaction with an unwelcome ruling. That temptation must be resisted here. This chapter exists to build a vocabulary precise enough to distinguish judicial capture from three phenomena it is regularly confused with: corruption, judicial bias, and institutional dependence. The distinction matters because the remedies differ. Corruption is addressed through criminal law and disciplinary process. Bias is addressed through recusal rules and diversity of appointment. Institutional dependence is addressed through structural reform of funding and tenure. Capture, if it exists, requires something more — a reordering of the relationship between the judicial and executive branches at the level of incentive and structure, not merely of individual conduct.
-
ItemEnvironmental justice: constitutionalism, equity, development and environmental governance in Uganda(Suigeneris Publishing House, 2026)Justice, it has been said, is the first virtue of social institutions. Yet for much of the history of law, the natural environment remained conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of justice. Rivers were resources. Forests were timber. Wetlands were wastelands awaiting development. The earth itself was object, not subject — available for exploitation by whoever held the legal title to exploit it. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century, as the costs of industrialisation and extractive capitalism began to fall most heavily on those least able to resist them, that environmental justice emerged as a coherent legal, political, and philosophical response to this dispossession.1 In Uganda, the environmental justice problem is not an abstraction. It is the Nakivubo Channel flooding a slum community because drainage was sold to developers. It is the oil drilling on Lake Albert proceeding without meaningful consultation with fishing communities whose livelihoods it will permanently transform. It is the wetland restoration order demolishing the home of a poor family while the large-scale developer who cleared ten times as much wetland faces no sanction. It is the Karamoja miner who leaves behind a landscape of craters and acid tailings without ever having paid a meaningful restoration bond.