The Rule of the Courts

Courts and Rule of Law: Past, Present, and Future

to intervene in society at the beginning of the 20th century. For, as BRADLEY / EWING write, “the explosion of government in the 20th century did not wait for British legal practitioners and academics to first understand what administrative law was. The first textbooks on the subject appeared in the late 1920s. Initially, a limited approach was taken to the subject, confining it to delegated legislation and the exercise of judicial powers by administrative authorities. It was only later that a broader definition of Administrative Law was adopted, encompassing all the powers and duties of the Administration, as well as its judicial control” (BRADLEY / EWING) 44 . It should also be noted that, contrary to another idea that is still widespread today, in the United Kingdom, Administrative Law (which, as we have seen, became established throughout the 20th century), in addition to its substantive and procedural aspects, also has its own contentious dimension. One need only look at the definitions in the main textbooks to see how different authors attach extraordinary importance to the necessary connection between law and administrative justice, which, at first glance, one would not expect to see emphasised in a system known as “judicial administration”. Thus, for example, WADE / FORSYTH characterise Administrative Law as that “which deals with the control of governmental power”, stating that “the primary objective of Administrative Law is (...) to keep the powers of government within their legal limits, as well as to protect citizens against their abuses” 45 . And it is precisely with regard to the link between law and administrative justice that the British system, which did not go through a “difficult childhood”, will present problems of “asserting personality”, generating serious “internal conflicts” caused by the distance between the “reality” actually experienced and what is “said” about it (or, in other words, between the “body” and the “image of the body”), which also require psychoanalytic analysis. In fact – theoretically – the control of the Administration by the ordinary courts,

44 BRADLEY / EWING, Constitutional and Administrative Law, 13th ed., Longmann, London / New York, 2003, pp. 702-703. 45 WADE / FORSYTH, Administrative Law, 9th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 4-5.

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