Judicial Review and Good Administration: Refining the Public Interest Model of Judicial Intervention

While UK judicial review is comparatively under-theorised, the literature has been catching up, with numerous theoretical underpinnings now identified. However, while each of these explanations captures an aspect of what judicial review is doing, they operate at a level of generality that can be descriptively and functionally limited. Focusing in particular on the ‘good administration’ concept of review—which has underdeveloped explanatory and hortatory potential—I propose a richer version of this approach using conceptual paradigms drawn from policy-making and public administration literature. The use of such concepts provides a framework for discussion of legal doctrine which yields a number of important insights. It better explains and understands judicial review’s nature and role, and demonstrates the sophistication of its interrelationship with questions of public policy. At the same time, it facilitates critique of doctrine and its application insofar as it fails to respond sensitively to administrative context. In so doing, it provides practical guidance for decision makers faced with traversing the distance between the abstract grounds of review and their deployment in concrete cases. More broadly, this approach provides novel critical perspectives on well-trodden constitutional debates regarding legislative intention, and political and legal constitutionalism.