ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an avenue of resistance and reformulation — what the French call le contentieux administratif — or litigation challenging the legality of administrative action. Given its potential impact on the effective content of legislative norms, the question of administrative justice has, unsurprisingly, been a contested one in the political and constitutional history of modern nation-states. The chapter considers the experiences of two such states, France and Britain (or more specifically England), from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Its perspective is admittedly ‘top-down’, limiting itself to describing the ‘high politics’ of administrative litigation rather than the ways in which social interests have, over time, resorted to lawsuits in their effort to control state action. The widely recognised inadequacies of the British system of administrative justice in the late 1940s and early 1950s in fact provided the terrain on which antagonists from the interwar period could find a point of agreement.
