Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: A Law Commission Consultation Paper is an ephemeral document, a step along a road to something more permanenta Report which, with a fair wind, may generate Rules of Court, perhaps, or statutory provisions.Even if the Commission's efforts are not crowned with a legislative accolade, a Law Commission Report may influence the thinking of judges, practitioners and academics for many years, and may guide developments in the common law.A Consultation Paper is primarily designed to elicit views through what might be called a two-way monologue.The Consultation Paper on judicial review and statutory appeals' has also generated a great deal of discussion and dialogue in numerous meetings and seminars attended by judges, practitioners, academics, civil servants and 'consumers' of judicial review and statutory appeals, as well as the Law Commissioner responsible for the project, Mr Jack Beatson.Since this note is being published months after the consultation period ended on 30 June 1993, there seems little point in adding to the welter of advice by commenting in detail on the various options for reform outlined in the Paper.It would seem more sensible to attempt an assessment of the reform agenda embodied in the Paper because, no matter what comes out of the consultation exercise, the parameters of the Commission's ensuing Report are likely to be essentially the same as those of the Paper.In academic book reviews, it is not uncommon for reviewers to bemoan the fact that the author has not written the book which the reviewer would have (wanted) written.In that context, such a complaint is often neither fair nor useful.To point out issues of policy or principle not touched upon by the Commission in its Consultation Paper might be thought similarly churlish.But the work of the Law Commission can, potentially at least, have effects in the world of action which authors of academic treatises, as such, rarely achieve; and it is as important to understand the limits of the agenda which the Commission's work addresses (and hence the nature of its potential effects) as to examine the minutiae of that agenda.There is little point in criticising the Commission for the limited scope of its work because it operates in a restricting institutional and political framework.But there is good reason to identify what its work leaves undone for others to do if they can.The Law Commission is, of course, neither popularly elected nor politically responsible.For this reason, its province is technical 'lawyers' law.' This, no doubt, partly explains why both of the Commission's forays into administrative law have been concerned with procedures and remedies.Administrative law is, by common agreement, at the interface between law and politics.Judicial control of governmental action in general, and judicial review applications in particular, often raise fundamental issues about the distribution of decision-making power between the courts and the executive, between central and local government, between the UK and the EC, and so on.They also confront us with important *Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Source: Modern Law Review
Author: Peter Cane
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2085021840