1st Edition

The Private Justice Gap Devising a Legal Defence to the Harm of Judging

By Célia Filipa Ferreira Matias Copyright 2026
188 Pages
by Routledge

188 Pages
by Routledge

This book examines how private justice challenges the state’s monopoly on adjudication, with a particular focus on today's digital contexts.   The author contends that private interventions can be legitimate expressions of justice rather than threats to it, and argues for a nuanced approach. This applies when such interventions respond to genuine injustices and meet the criteria of... Read more

1. Introduction  2. An Eye for an Eye: Revenge, Justice and the Law  3. Procedural Justice and the Private Justice Gap  4. Architecture, Regulation and the ‘Ethos’ of the Internet  5. Digital Private Justice: A Hostile Takeover of the Justice-Making Process?  6. The Harm of Judging: Digital Private Justice and the Law  7. A Private Justice Defence  8. Conclusion

Biography

Célia Filipa Ferreira Matias is an assistant professor with the Department of Global Legal Studies of the Faculty of Law, University of Macau, where she was previously a UM Macao Fellow. She holds a PhD from the University of Hong Kong (2021) and an LLM on information technology and intellectual property law (2015) from the same institution. Her research interests lie in the intersection of law and technology, as well as legal theory and intellectual property.