Introduction
| Author | Matthew Groves |
| DOI | 10.22145/flr.45.4.2 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Matthew Groves
One of the many works of the American public law scholar KC Davis was his text
Administrative Law and Government. The purpose of that book, which was the seventh
Davis published in a single decade, was to foster the ‘liberal education’ of political
science students. Davis explained his book was not designed to convert political
scientists into lawyers. Its more modest aim was to help those students understand how
law regulated public life and why administrative law had begun to grow relentlessly.
Davis identified a simple functional reason for that growth. Administrative law was an
essential oil in the machinery of modern governance. He explained:
Anyone who probes below the surface of administrative law soon encounters some of the
most basic problems of organized society—how to resolve controversies, how to discover
what is justice, how to make decisions in concrete cases outside the legislative branch of
government, how to reconcile desires for freedom with demands for positive government,
how to formulate policy that will reflect both a democratic will and expertise of the
specialists, how to prevent abuse of business power without unduly damaging free
enterprise incentives.1
So long as organized society yields complexities and disputes, as it inevitably will,
administrative law will function as one way to resolve our social and political problems.
When understood way, the purpose of administrative law is much broader than the one
that appears currently favoured in Australian public law—the control of public power.
Administrative law instead serves the wider role of providing a doctrinal framework to
ask and answer many problems of contemporary government. If so, it is inevitable and
arguably desirable that the outer edges of administrative law reflect the key political and
social problems of our time.
The contributions to this special issue examine many of those key problems but also
draw...
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