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Courts and Administrators, A Study in Jurisprudence . By M.J. Detmold. [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1989. x, 222 and (Indexes) 7 pp. Hardback £16.95 net.]

OF the many books now available on administrative law, M.J. Detmold's latest work is undoubtedly one of the most subtle, interesting and fundamental. It confronts the central dilemma of the subject, how to reconcile the demands of effective and efficient government with the court's constitutional responsibility for right and justice in the particular case; and builds on the ideas and arguments of his earlier books, The Unity of Law and Morality (1984) {JJLM) and The Australian Commonwealth (1985) (AC). Detmold starts with a wholly proper insistence on the mutually supportive functions of law and philosophy. His purpose is to seek the philosophical core of administrative law: "to state the true and limited place of the common law courts in the matter of freedom in government." The result is a closelyargued and thought-provoking work, which casts new light on many recurrent issues in contemporary public law. This review can give only a flavour of Detmold's thought, with tentative comment on its strengths and weaknesses. In ULM, Detmold elaborated his (very persuasive) theory of the primacy of the single case. First, a judge cannot escape moral responsibility for his decision. For example, a judge who orders that the prisoner be hanged cannot pass all responsibility to Parliament, which passed the statute requiring the hanging. He must necessarily take responsibility for deciding—in that case—whether Parliament should be obeyed. Secondly, there is a logical gulf between the adoption of rules and their application in particular cases. Though there may, for example, be a balance of reasons in favour of a rule that all statutes are to be recognised as valid, there may nonetheless be a balance of reasons against its application in the single case. It will sometimes be rational to adopt an absolute rule on the ground that the recognition of exceptions will be likely to lead to more instances of error overall. A qualified rule may cause more wrong decisions than it saves. A judge might, then, consistently acknowledge an absolute rule in favour of the recognition of statutes, but decide in reason against recognition of a law requiring the execution of all blue-eyed babies. The reasons in the matter of the particular case are never identical with the reasons in the matter of the rule. Detmold also insists that law is a practical activity. Rules are necessarily formulated in terms of universals. Practical judgment of specific cases, however, is determined by particular facts: reasons for action (like giving judgment) are founded on particulars. (Hence the refusal of the common law to decide hypothetical cases.) Indeed, judgment in the hard case, given on the basis of reasons, cannot escape the necessity of passionate commitment to facts.