Book Review: Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places

Published date01 August 2021
AuthorMichael Adler
DOI10.1177/0964663920975840
Date01 August 2021
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
MARGARET DOYLE AND NICK O’BRIEN, Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in
Small Places. Cham: Palgrave Pivot, 2020, pp. 163, ISBN 978-3-030-21387-9163 (hbk): 978-3-030-
21388-6 (e-book).
In this unusual book, Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien attempt to ‘forge an alliance
between administrative justice and human rights’ (p. vii) which, in their view, have for
the most part been ‘ships that pass in the night’ (p. 4). They acknowledge that admin-
istrative justice and human rights are ‘unfamiliar partners’ (p. 3) occupying different
territories: the former being associated with procedural fairness and decision-making in
public services while the latter is associated with civil liberties and their enforcement by
the courts. The authors attempt to challenge this separation by reuniting the two con-
cepts, seeing both of them as egalitarian (rather than libertarian) and democratic (rather
than individualistic) responses to grievances. In order to do so, they argue that it is
necessary to recover the ‘social democratic and post-war roots of administrative justice
and human rights’ (p. 1) and to trace their unravelling by a combination of neo-liberalism
and legalism that has privileged the individual user over the plurality of users. Central to
this task is what used to be called the ‘ombudsman’ but which Doyle and O’Brien refer to
throughout the book as the ‘ombud’ institution, using investigation rather than adjudica-
tion as the preferred means for resol ving grievances. In what follows , I set out six
criticisms of the arguments in the book.
My first criticism is that the historical reference points Doyle and O’Brien use to
frame their argument are incorrect. The book claims that the origins of administrative
justice are associated with what the historian Tony Judt identified as ‘the post-war social
democratic moment’ (p. 4), i.e. with the construction of the ‘welfare state’ by the post-
war Labour government. Perhaps the best-known account of the reforms that were
introduced during this period can be found in T H Marshall’s seminal essay ‘Citizenship
and Social Class’ (Marshall, 1950). In it, Marshall argues that citizenship in the welfare
state comprises three clusters of rights: civil rights, political rights and social rights, each
of which is associated with a different set of institutions. Thus, civil rights are intimately
bound up with the legal system and with adjudication in the courts, political rights are
associated with elections and accountability to parliament, while social rights are asso-
ciated with the institutions of the welfare state, i.e. with social security, health care,
public housing, education, social work etc.
The authors should have pointed out that the social rights introduced by the post-war
Labour government were substantive rights (rights to a given outcome, e.g. to a social
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(4) 669–681
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663920975840
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