La Huronne au Palais‐Royal or a Naïve Perspective on Administrative Law
| Date | 01 June 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00156 |
| Published date | 01 June 2000 |
Review Article
La Huronne au Palais-Royal or a Naı¨ve Perspective on
Administrative Law
Carol Harlow*
I cannot remember when I first stumbled on Professor Hamson. It was
certainly not during my student days, when law was literally a closed book to
me. I cannot recall opening any law book other than Nutshells and a few
designated texts, though I did know where the KCL Law Library was located
and I believe I that I may once have gone inside and opened a volume of the
Law Reports. When I qualified – how was that achieved – it was politely
suggested that it might be appropriate if I withdrew from the legal profession
and became a social worker. Instead I drifted into teaching.
Arguably, Executive Discretion and Judicial Control, Professor Hamson’s
Hamlyn Lectures,
1
were in breach of the objects of the trust which are, in
Miss Hamlyn’s own words, the spread of knowledge about the common law
with a view to ensuring that ‘the Common People of the United Kingdom
may realise the privileges which in law and custom they enjoy in comparison
with other European Peoples’. In defiance of this chauvinist sentiment,
Professor Hamson set out in Executive Discretion and Judicial Control to
provide a rather detailed account of the way in which administration is
subjected to the rule of law in France. In contrast to Dicey, whose work
Hamson admired and to which he was scrupulously fair,
2
Hamson had come
to suspect that the advantage in protecting the citizen from abuse of power
lay with France. Yet on the pretext that French administrative law as
described to him ‘sounded too good to be true’, Hamson was able to visit the
French Conseil d’Etat in order that ‘it be demonstrated to me that the rule
effectively stood in France as it was stated to stand’.
3
322
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1 C.J. Hamson, Executive Discretion and Judicial Control, An Aspect of the French
Conseil d’Etat (1954).
2 id., pp. 50–3. For Dicey’s partial recantation, see A.V. Dicey, ’Droit administratif in
Modern French Law’ (1901) 18 Law Q. Rev. 302. And see F.H. Lawson, ‘Dicey
Revisited’ [1959] Political Studies 109, 207.
3 Hamson, id., at p. 13.
*Law Department, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, England
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