Book Review: MICHAEL ADLER (ed.), Administrative Justice in Context. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010, 531 + xxvi pp., ISBN 9781841139289, £50.00 (hbk)
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639110200020703 |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Maurice Sunkin |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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MICHAEL ADLER (ed.), Administrative Justice in Context. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010,
531 þ xxvi pp., ISBN 9781841139289, £50.00 (hbk).
This excellent collection, edited by Michael Adler, is testimony to the fact that administrative
justice has become a field of interest and scholarship as rich, diverse, challenging and, in
many ways, as important to citizens as civil and criminal justice. The collection brings
together 19 chapters, written by leading experts in the field, which deal with aspects of
administrative justice from a variety of disciplinary and jurisdictional perspectives.
The volume is the product of a seminar series organized by Michael Adler and funded
by the ESRC. All the chapters, save David Feldman’s and those which provide compara-
tive perspectives, were based on papers presented during the series. In designing the series
and editing this book, Adler’s goal was to break away from what he considers to have
been the overly institutional approach that had previously dominated the study of admin-
istrative justice in the UK. In his introduction he castigates much of the earlier scholarship
for being overly descriptive, blinkered and intellectually unexciting. Accordingly, the aim
of the ESRC seminars was (amongst other things) to encourage a more holistic approach
to thinking about administrative justice and to provide an opportunity to review the the-
oretical work; to consider the implications of recent developments; to bring together aca-
demics from across the fields of administrative justice in order to encourage dialogue;
and, to develop a research agenda. Building on the success of the seminar series, this book
provides a significant tangible resource that should do much to further this agenda. It will
be of considerable value both to those already familiar with the field and those for whom
administrative justice remains as yet uncharted territory.
In the space available it is impossible to review each of the chapters in a manner that
does them justice and I will not attempt to do so. Rather, I will try to pick out some of the
broader issues and give a more general flavour of the book.
The volume has five parts. Part 1, ‘Contextual Changes and their Implications for
Administrative Decision Making’, has five chapters. The first, by Andrew Gamble and
Robert Thomas, explores the changing context of governance in Britain over the past
30 years or so. This inevitably broad sweeping chapter sets up themes that are discussed
in more detail in later chapters. In particular, Gamble and Thomas stress the increasing
complexity of governance: the prevalence of ‘governance through networks and markets,
privatisation and contracting-out’ (p. 20) and the diffusion of powers upward beyond the
state and downwards...
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