Administrative Law: Judicial Review Reviewed

Extract

We are met here this evening in memory of Stanley de Smith to pay a tribute to his labours in the field of English public law. His name will always be associated with the constitutional law of the British Commonwealth in its decline and the administrative law of England in its renaissance. It was in connection with the first of these topics in the nineteen fifties that I first met him when he was a brilliant young law don at the London School of Economics and I was a fairly senior silk instructed on behalf of the Kabaka in the constitutional dispute about Buganda. The depth of knowledge on constitutional matters which he then displayed encouraged me to seek his help in the last constitutional case in which I was engaged before I went on to the High Court bench. It involved appearing before the Federal Court in Pakistan and, unless my memory plays me false, it was de Smith who drew my attention to opinions given by the Law Officers in the seventeenth century about the government of the Plantations, that supplied the basis for the argument that was ultimately accepted by that court.

The rapid constitutional changes which followed on the attainment of independence by former colonial territories have, perhaps, converted into legal history much of de Smith's work in this particular field of public law. So I propose to take as the subject of this memorial lecture that other field of public law which he was to make his own: administrative law and, in particular, judicial review of administrative action.