ABSTRACT
During the second half of the twentieth century, however, law became increasingly central to public administrative practice and gained more attention in theory and pedagogy. The immediate effect of the legal dimension is to subordinate public administration further to the rule of law. More generally, though, it contributes to the integration of large-scale administration into the nation's system of constitutional government. This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book has the following claims: Much of the legal dimension was developed by the federal courts as they applied statutory and constitutional law to numerous cases; as constructed by the judiciary, the legal dimension enables the courts to play a large, ongoing role in supervising and instructing public administrators; consequently, any vision of public administration that ignores the contemporary legal dimension is seriously inadequate.
