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"1st edition 1905 . reprinted . 1924." ; Relation between law and public opinion.--Characteristics of law-making opinion in England.--Democracy and legislation.--The three main currents of public opinion.--The period of old Toryism or legislative quiescence.--The period of Benthamism or individualism.--The growth of collectivism.--Period of collectivism.--The debt of collectivism to Benthamism.--Counter-currents and cross-currents of legislative opinion.--Judicial legislation.--Relation between legislative opinion and general public opinion.--Appendix: I. the right of association. II. The Ecclesiastical commission. III. University tests. IV. Judge-made law. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The legal position of public sector employees who challenge employment decisions taken by the state or organs of state in its/their capacity as employer in South Africa has long been problematic. Even though at least four judgments by the Constitutional Court of South Africa have considered whether employment-related decisions in the public sector domain do or could amount to administrative action and whether administrative law and/or labour law should be applicable for purposes of dispute resolution, legal uncertainty remains the order of the day due to a combination of factors. The authors assess whether (and to what extent) the rich South African administrative-law jurisprudence remains of importance in relation to the public employment relationship, bearing in mind the applicable legal considerations, including the inter-relatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of the range of applicable fundamental constitutional rights. Considering the debate in other jurisdictions on this issue, the authors develop a paradigm for situating different employment-related disputes as matters to be decided on labour and/or administrative-law principles in South Africa. This requires an appreciation, to the extent relevant, of the unique nature public sector employment relationships and a detailed investigation of the applicable legal sources and precise parameters of the cases already decided in the country. The position of employees deliberately excluded from the scope of labour legislation is analysed, for example, as is the legal position of high-ranking public sector employees. The outcome of the investigation is important for determining the legal principles to be applied in cases involving public sector employees in their employment relationship, and for purposes of determining the question of jurisdiction. Recent cases, for example where the courts have permitted the state, as employer, to review its own disciplinary decision (via a state-appointed chairperson of a disciplinary hearing) on the basis that this amounts to administrative action which is reviewable, are also examined in the light of the uncertainty regarding the precise nature and scope of the review.

The Supreme Court of Canada's advisory opinion inReference re Secession of Quebec, 1998(also known, more simply, as the "Quebec reference case") has been the subject of much interpretation and comment, because of its obvious implications for the future of Canada.1However, it offers an arguably wider opportunity to consider the role of the judiciary within a liberal democracy. The professional nature of the legal process and its practitioners often has made legal and judicial institutions, to most of the public, distant and alien components of the political system. The technical aspects of many areas of law (such as contracts, torts, and civil procedure) may, in fact, make this area of public concern seem unapproachable to the average citizen; indeed, some legal practitioners may prefer that the law remain that way. That mystique often is transferred to the realm of constitutional law, where the use of technical terms (including Latin words and phrases) may serve, intentionally or not, to insulate legal arguments and proceedings from public scrutiny.2

It is conventionally assumed that administrative discretionary decisions are determined by political and expert-driven considerations and that law's structuring and constraining capacity in that regard is and should be limited. Law defines a space within which discretionary choices are irrelevant to law because they have the same legal value. These tenets have shaped both the ways the Court of Justice of the European Union has approached judicial review of discretion and, more generally, the way law is perceived to structure administrative discretion in the Member States and also in the EU. However, the recent expansion of the regulatory powers of the European Union justifies revisiting these basic axioms. In particular, how far should discretion be shielded from the values that EU law conveys? This paper proposes a normative elaboration of a core idea of public law to stress that law twins administrative discretion with a duty of regard to pre-determined public interests. On this basis, legal rules are able to provide a yardstick of critique of decisions that administrative officials adopt within spaces of discretion. An analysis of the Meroni judgment shows how this argument applies to EU law. But this claim only prepares the ground for a more complex inquiry: How does law operate – and how should it operate – within the spaces of administrative discretion, and how should courts review discretionary decisions? Administrative decision-makers construct the law in a specific institutional context in view of their specific tasks. Arguably, one should understand the specific processes through which they interpret the law to know how law may provide substantive criteria that guide discretionary choices. Such understanding would also be the basis to define and assess suitable degrees of judicial review of administrative discretion. One could then make a critical assessment – difficult to make at present – of the shifting boundaries between spaces of discretion and of judicial review that the dictum "manifest error of assessment, misuse of power or excess of power" conceals. This latter argument draws on the debate among US administrative law scholars on agency interpretation of statutes, but it is also mindful of conceptual distinctions that have prevailed in legal scholarship in Europe. The paper defines the prolegomena of a normative framework of a broader research project. It is work in progress.