ADMINISTRATIVE TRIBUNALS AND ADJUDICATION by PETER CANE
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00517.x |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
Book Reviews
ADMINISTRATIVE TRIBUNALS AND ADJUDICATION by PETER CANE
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009, xxvi and 285 pp., £25.00)
The prospect of a book on administrative tribunals and adjudication by Peter
Cane, who is not only a very distinguished administrative lawyer but also
someone who appreciates the importance of socio-legal research, aroused my
curiosity. How, I wondered, would he approach this rather mundane subject
and what would he make of it? According to Cane, his original plan was to
undertake a theoretical study of the Australian Administrative Appeals
Tribunal (AAT). However, in order to accomplish this task satisfactorily, he
extended it in three ways: institutionally ± in order to cover not only the
AAT but also a larger set of administrative tribunals; comparatively ± in
order to contrast the AAT with analogous institutions in the United
Kingdom, the United States of America and, to a lesser extent, France; and
historically ± in order to identify the antecedents of contemporary admini-
strative tribunals in each of these jurisdictions. These extensions should have
made what would otherwise have been a very specialized book, which would
probably have been of interest only to a small number of legal `butterfly
collectors', into one with a rather wider appeal. However, I do not think that,
in this respect, he has really succeeded.
Cane recognizes, at the outset, that, for many academic administrative
lawyers, administrative tribunals are of only peripheral interest. This is
because, like magistrates' courts, small-claims courts, and other `inferior'
courts, they do not make high-profile decisions that provide definitive
interpretations of the law or generate examples of legal reasoning from
which scholars and students can learn. However, he also acknowledges that,
because administrative tribunals provide the forum in which members of the
public can challenge the decisions of government departments and public
agencies, and because in each of the jurisdictions analysed in this book they
are used by very large numbers of people, this represents what he describes
as `a blinkered point of view' and constitutes `an extremely unsatisfactory
state of affairs'. So far, so good.
Socio-legal research can be distinguished from other, more conventional,
forms of legal scholarship in a number of ways. First, while more conven-
tional forms of legal scholarship tend to focus on `leading cases', that is, on
those rather exceptional cases that find their way into the superior courts and
establish precedents that others are expected to follow, socio-legal scholars
often focus on routine cases, since these constitute most people's experience
of the law. Second, while more conventional forms of legal scholarship tend
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