Friday, May 26, 2017

Cane on the Comparative History of Administrative Law

Controlling Administrative PowerWe noted a book symposium at Queen Mary in London for Controlling Administrative Power: A Comparative History back in Nov.2016, but here is the full announcement. The book, by Peter Cane (Australian National University, Canberra), came out in 2016 with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher:
This wide-ranging comparative account of the legal regimes for controlling administrative power in England, the USA and Australia argues that differences and similarities between control regimes may be partly explained by the constitutional structures of the systems of government in which they are embedded. It applies social-scientific and historical methods to the comparative study of law and legal systems in a novel and innovative way, and combines accounts of long-term and large-scale patterns of power distribution with detailed analysis of features of administrative law and the administrative justice systems of three jurisdictions. It also proposes a new method of analysing systems of government based on two different models of the distribution of public power (diffusion and concentration), a model which proves more illuminating than traditional separation-of-powers analysis.
Two blurbs:

"An important and original contribution to administrative law and comparative government in a simple and very clear style." -Susan Rose-Ackerman

"Cane's greatest achievement in this book is his demonstration of extraordinary 'fluency' in the subtleties of the English, US and Australian systems of administrative law and governance. He is at his absolute best in comparative legal analysis, informed by a strong sense of the historical development of the administrative state in each country." -Peter L. Lindseth


Further information is available here.