Carol Harlow and Richard Rawlings, LAW AND ADMINISTRATION Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), 3rd edn, 2009. lii + 827 pp. ISBN 9780521701792 (pb). £38. ISBN 9780521197076 (hb). £80.

Date01 May 2010
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0011
AuthorChris Himsworth
Published date01 May 2010
Pages331-332

It will be only rarely that the third edition of a student textbook, especially one published outside Scotland, deserves the benefit of a note in this Review. I believe that Law and Administration is such a rare exception and should attract a brief comment. For newcomers, it should be brought to their attention as a book at the core of the “law in context” enterprise and written very much in a spirit of enquiry into both administrative law and the administrative practice within which that law is implemented, enforced and, to a considerable extent, made. It is enormously wide-ranging in its coverage of judicial review (including the increasing prevalence of review on human rights grounds) at the numerous points at which it impinges on administrative decision-making; the contribution of complaints procedures; ombudsmen (including the relationship of the Parliamentary Commissioner with courts as in the R (Bradley) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2009] QB 114); tribunals (including their new structures and relationships with courts through the Upper Tribunal); and inquiries in their reformed state under the Inquiries Act 2005. There is substantial treatment of the phenomenon of regulation and the routes, within it, to accountability. The significance of public/private contracting and PPP and PFI are assessed. Overall the writing has an admirable depth and attention to detail and draws on references from a huge range of sources.

For those readers familiar with the earlier editions of the book there are additional pleasures. The authors’ own preface with its commentaries on developments which have occurred and milestones passed (in both the legal and more broadly political spheres) in the years since the first edition of 1984 provides valuable insights. In 1984 the GCHQ case (CCSU v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374) had yet to be decided. Politically, the full impact of Thatcherism on politics, the economy and the law had yet to be appreciated. The second edition in 1997 was published just on the cusp of the arrival of the Human Rights Act 1998 and all the devolution Acts of the same year. As the authors admit, it is difficult to predict in what new directions events will take us during the life of the third edition. What new cusp awaits? Especially in the light of the financial disasters of 2008?

In the meantime, the new edition is here to be enjoyed by a further generation of students and their teachers. It is gratifying to find that...

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