Law and Administration has never been simply a textbook of administrative law. As its title signifi es, our primary objective in writing it was to further the study of law in the context of public administration and politics: the ‘law in context’ approach. We need to remind the contemporary reader that the fi rst edition refl ected an era of legal formalism when the study of case law, largely divorced from its social context, was seen as the be-all-and-end-all of legal studies. Th e formalist approach was refl ected both in the dominant casebook method of teaching and the leading administrative law textbooks: de Smith’s Judicial Review of.
