Introduction

Summary

I had the honour of delivering the Hamlyn Lectures in 2014. The three lectures that comprise the Hamlyn series were delivered in November–December 2014 and dealt with the following topics: ‘Foundations of UK Administrative Law: The Common Law Method, Values and Contestation’; ‘Foundations of EU Administrative Law: Treaty Foundations, Judicial Creativity and the Hierarchy of Norms’; and ‘Foundations of Global Administrative Law: Governance, Regulatory Power beyond the State and Administrative Legality’.

A unifying theme running through the three lectures was therefore that they dealt with aspects of the foundations of UK, EU and global administrative law respectively. The word ‘aspects’ should be emphasized in this context, because this book is not simply the product of the three lectures duly polished for publication. The reality was that the lectures covered only part of the material concerning the foundations of administrative law in the three legal systems, on average circa 25–30 per cent, and did not touch the analysis of the challenges faced by each system.

The book seeks to do what it says ‘on the tin’, viz. address the foundations and challenges of administrative law in and between these three systems. It is not a literature review. It does not seek systematically to expound the state of the art in relation to all issues discussed. It does explicate the background to the discussion, providing sufficient information for the reader to understand what follows, as exemplified by the treatment of the foundational material on global administrative law, with which many readers will be less familiar. The book also examines the views of particular scholars where that is pertinent to the inquiry. The overall objective is nonetheless to advance the debate on contentious issues, not to provide some potted version of the status quo. The choice of the three legal orders is reflective of the fact that administrative law functions at the national, regional and global level.