ABSTRACT

As Professor Cecil Carr observed as far back as 1941, government used to be regarded as the sole provider of services and the only guardian of the public wealth. This is how he put it:

Modern commentators have stressed the ever-growing power of the state and how the growth has affected the relations between the state and its citizens. Professor Wade set out it in this way:

In 1981, the Justice All Souls Report described the modern state similarly as follows:

In that kind of milieu, the principal preoccupation of public law has been to ensure that individual rights and liberties are adequately protected. This challenge has become even more sharpened as the state is now an entrepreneur, controlling industry and providing services and benefits. Public law has been struggling to keep pace with these developments in cases such as R v Panel on Takeovers and Mergers ex p Datafin plc,12 Williams Construction Ltd v AG of Barbados,13 and Rambachan v Trinidad & Tobago Televison14 show.