Hybrid | English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change

English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change

Speaker: Professor Paul Craig (University of Oxford)

Commentators: Professor Tom Hickman (UCL Laws), Professor Jeff King (UCL Laws)

Chair: Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)

Abstract

In this edition of the Public Law Seminar Series, hosted by the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism at UCL Laws, renowned scholar Paul Craig will present on his new book English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change. Following his presentation, commentators will offer their remarks, leading into further discussions. The event will be chaired by Prof Erin Delaney.

About the Book

The commonly held view about English administrative law is that it is of recent origin, with some dating it from the mid-20th century and some venturing back to the late 19th century. English Administrative Law from 1550: Continuity and Change upends this conventional thinking, charting its development from the mid-16th century with an in-depth examination of administrative law doctrine based on primary legal materials, statute, and case law….With thought-provoking and original insights, English Administrative Law from 1550 systematically elaborates and contextualizes the origins of administrative law features while linking them to their modern-day equivalents.

Watch the video directly on our YouTube Channel or view it below

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About the Speaker

Paul Craig is Emeritus Professor of English Law, St John's College, Oxford. His research interests cover Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Comparative Administrative Law and Legal History. He has written widely in these areas, with the most recent new book length publication being English Administrative from 1550: Continuity and Change (Oxford University Press, 2024). He was the UK alternate member of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe between 2010-2019. He is a  Visiting Professor of Law at NYU Abu Dhabi.  

About the Commentators and Chair

Professor Erin Delaney joined UCL Laws as Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law in September 2024, and she serves as the Inaugural Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. She retains an affiliation with Northwestern University where she was Professor of Law at the Pritzker School of Law and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Letters. She is currently the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law, Co-Editor of the Hart Series on Judging and the Courts, Co-Editor of the International & Comparative Law Section of JOTWELL, and a member of the editorial boards of Public Law and the Brill Series on Studies in Territorial and Cultural Diversity Governance. She is an elected Member of the American Law Institute, and an Advisory Board Member of the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law.

Professor Delaney was the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence at Eurac Research’s Institute for Comparative Federalism in Bolzano, Italy, and held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University. She has also held research fellowships at Edinburgh University and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Prior to her position at Northwestern, she served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter and to Second Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi. She received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Law Review. She earned an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Cambridge; her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Walter Bagehot Prize from the U.K. Political Studies Association. She has an A.B. in Government, magna cum laude, from Harvard College. 

Professor Jeff King joined the UCL Laws in 2011 and has been Professor of Law since 2016. He is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.  He sits on the Editorial Committees of the journals Public Law and the Federal Law Review, and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law (ICON Society), and is a member of the Study of Parliament Group.  He was previously the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the Co-Editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). He has held visiting posts at the University of Oxford (2019-2022), University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing), the University of New South Wales, and in 2014-15 was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.

Professor Tom Hickman is a Graduate of Cambridge University and the University of Toronto. He is a Barrister at Blackstone Chambers. He has been Standing Counsel to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner since 2017. Tom writes and teaches about constitutional law, administrative law, human rights and national security law.

He is author of Public Law After the Human Rights Act (2010) (Inner Temple Book Prize 2008-11 (new author)); co-author of Human Rights : Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom (2008).

Tom often blogs on the UK Constitutional Law Group Blog including well-known blog posts on access to justice (“Public Law’s Disgrace" (Part 1 and Part 2)) and “Pulling the Article 50 Trigger: Parliament’s Indispensable Role” with Jeff King and Nick Barber, which argued that legislation was necessary to trigger Article 50 and led to the Supreme Court's ruling in the Miller I case (in which Tom also acted as Counsel). A blog on the misuse of guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic is available here; and a blog on the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 here.

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.

Book your place

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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