Reconciling with the Past: John Willis and the Question of Judicial Review in Inter-War and Post-War England

• Published in: The University of Toronto law journal 2005-07, Vol.55 (3), p.657-689
• Main Author: Lindseth, Peter L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Administrative courts; Administrative law; Common law; Courts of law; History; Judicial review; Judicial reviews; Law schools; Parliaments; Public administration; Regulatory legislation; Rule of law; Statutory law; Tribunals; Willis and the Contemporary Administrative State; Willis, John
• ISSN: 0042-0220; 1710-1174; 1710-1174
• DOI: 10.1353/tlj.2005.0017

John Willis's 1933 classic, 'The Parliamentary Powers of the English Government Departments', is essential reading to any historian interested in the debates over legislative delegation and administrative justice in inter-war England. The book's immediate purpose was to respond to the assertions made by Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice of England, in his notorious polemic, 'The New Despotism', published in 1929. Hewart argued, very much in a Diceyan vein, that the emergent administrative state was a perversion of the most venerable principles of the English constitution, notably parliamentary sovereignty and the 'Rule of Law' as enforced by the ordinary common law courts. Hewart asserted that, particularly during and after World War I, Parliament was using its undisputed sovereignty to make wholesale shifts of legislative authority outside the parliamentary realm and then, through a variety of statutory mechanisms, to deprive the ordinary courts of their rightful jurisdiction over the lawful exercise of that authority. The effect was to undermine the rule of law that had been a cornerstone of the English constitution since the seventeenth century.