This book presents a navigating framework of legal culture and legality to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the English and Australian determination of the grounds of judicial review. This book facilitates tangible process of how and why jurisdictional error, jurisdictional fact, proportionality and substantive legitimate expectations are debatable in English law, while they are either completely rejected or firmly entrenched in Australian law. This book argues that these differences are not just random. Legality is not just a fig-leaf, but is profoundly rooted in legal systems’ legal culture; hence, it dictates the way in which courts empower, justify, constrain or limit the scope of judicial review. This book presents evidence that courts differ in legal systems and apply diverse ways to determine the scope of judicial review based on their deep understanding of legality, which is embedded in the legal culture of their legal system. This book uses comparative methodology and develops this framework between English and Australian law. Although obvious and important, this book presents a kind of examination that has never been undertaken in this depth and detail before.

Judicial Review of Administrative Action and Government Liability Sixth Edition is one of Australia's most respected legal texts. It became the first title in our prestigious Lawbook Library Series, because it represents definitive legal scholarship and publishing excellence in Australian law. For two decades, this work has both mapped and supported development of the law and practice of judicial review of administrative action throughout Australia. Repeatedly cited in the High Court of Australia, this landmark work remains the definitive scholarly work for judicial officers, practitioners and students alike. Significant developments have occurred since the Fifth Edition published in 2013. The book now includes an entirely new chapter on what is now a substantial body of special statutory and common law rules that apply to government liability in contract, tort, and restitution. Numerous decisions of the High Court and the Federal Court, in particular, are producing a discernible relaxation of the traditional grounds of review, and a more expansive approach to the interpretation of regulatory statutes. In addition, the Full Court of the Federal Court has announced a simplification of the criteria for appeals limited to questions of law, overturning literally dozens of earlier precedents.

With the aim of expanding legal scholarly imagination, this Research Agenda takes a tripolar approach to administrative law. It opens the boundaries of administrative law scholarship to new subject areas, exemplifies and opens for consideration several different attitudes to research, and illustrates a multiplicity of different ways of writing about the subject.

In this Handbook, distinguished experts in the field of administrative law discuss a wide range of issues from a comparative perspective. The book covers the historical beginnings of comparative administrative law scholarship, and discusses important methodological issues and basic concepts such as administrative power and accountability.

Responsive Legality is an important book about twenty first century justice. It explores the legal and moral values that twenty-first-century public officials use to make their decisions, engaging existing theoretical models of administrative justice and updating them to reflect changed twenty-first-century conditions. Together, these features of twenty-first century public administration are coined ‘responsive legality’. Whereas twentieth-century public officials were generally driven by their concern for bureaucratic rationality, professional treatment, moral judgement and – towards the end of the century – the logics of ‘new managerialism’, the twenty-first-century public official embodies greater complexity in their characteristic pursuit of substantive and procedural justice. In responsive legality, government decision makers show a distinct concern for the protective parameters of the rule of law, a purposive pursuit of fair outcomes and a commitment to flexible decision making.

The mediation of the balance between vigilance and restraint is a fundamental feature of judicial review of administrative action in the Anglo-Commonwealth. This balance is realised through the modulation of the depth of scrutiny when reviewing the decisions of ministers, public bodies and officials. While variability is ubiquitous, it takes different shapes and forms. Dean R. Knight explores the main shapes and forms employed in judicial review in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand over the last fifty years. Four schemata are drawn from the case law and taken back to conceptual foundations, exposing their commonality and differences, and each approach is evaluated. This detailed methodology provides a sound basis for decisions and debates about how variability should be brought to individual cases and will be of great value to legal scholars, judges and practitioners interested in judicial review.